I had a few silhouette shots from our hawk flying session last wednesday where I’d been following the birds around a rather dull and grey sky. Most of them looked rather like this, which let’s face it, is hardly the most inspiring picture in the world.

I dug out a couple of recent sunset shots and set about dropping the falcon on top.
This was all pretty much a simple layer mask, starting from a simple magic wand selection I then tidied up the edges by hand.
It wasn't too painful, initially I spent about 20 mins using just the mouse (thank gh0d at least for Photoshop CS4’s amazingly useful canvas rotation thing) before I remembered my little Wacom tablet was sat behind the monitor – DOH! The next few mins were considerably less painful and inspire me to get a nicer and slightly larger tablet.
Anyway, 10 mins later, this was attempt #1:

linked with linkr
and #2

linked with linkr