Caracara takes off, Vile Miettinen, Machu Picchu, Peru. October 2007.
Initially the first thing that stands out is how crisp everything in this image is. It seems to have been bracketed with a high shutter speed and a high aperture. I don’t know if it was luck or what, but the bird flying through is a great strength to this picture. Based on my personal experiences shooting HDR compositions, I’m going to go ahead and assume it was a great stroke of luck. Pictures like this you can’t recreate naturally. There is just a lot to look at in this picture. Literally everything is interesting – clouds, bird, wall, mountains, lighting, etc.