Thanks all. A few words of explanation. As the title implies, this shot is of a single pelican (pelican singular rather than plural). I took 13 shots of it as it took off, all were in good focus and against a similar background. I used my Sony a7riv in 1.5 crop mode, high speed shutter with a canon 600mm f/4 lens. ISO 100, 1/2000s, f/4.5. I used Photoshop's new object selection tool and isolated the pelican in each shot and transferred them to a new document and put the thirteen into a group. I duplicated one of the shots to make it 14. (13 pelicans is supposed to be bad karma for a composite.

) I took one of the nicer backgrounds from the group and deleted the pelican from it and used that as the composite background.