Hey guys,
I was wondering how you all would go about in modeling feathered wings.

I tried using applying alpha channels to a photo reference of a feather and applied it to a tranparency shader. I then applied the shader to the plane I've duplicated and overlapped it over one another. Doing this actually isn't that cool because you can't see lightings on the feathers. If I applied the specularity to it, it would look flat lighting. I thought about doing a specularity map, but it doesn't look cool either. So....maybe there's a technique in modeling it?