Seagulls Multiplied

First off, this one turned out a lot more realistic than I expected. If you look close, you should be able to see artifacts that it is a montage. I had 10 different shots of this lone gull with other flying gulls and solo. The sequence starts from calms, to swell, to wave breaking. I upgraded to CS3. So, I let it auto-align my 10 images combined into a layer stack. That took about 45 minutes. I tried the auto exposure for the layer stack but that was too real looking. Instead, I used undo back to the auto-align step. Then, I masked in all the aligned layers with a mask to keep the bird on the beach intact. Then, I copied the layer stack again to work on the breaking surf. While masking in the breaking surf, I found a new Blending Mode in CS3 called Lighten Color. Most layers used the Lighten Color blending mode.