A beautiful bird from down under.

This is a Lady Gouldian finch from Australia. It is a very small bird, and to take a shot in which it fills a significant part of the frame I had to use a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto plus a 2X teleconverter giving me 1000mm of focal length. Most photographers hesitate to use a doubler for fear image quality will be degraded. That was true years ago, but now the optics are so good and the post-processing sharpening ability is so good that I no longer worry about a degradation in quality. When I use a 2X with my Canon 100-500mm zoom, the loss of light does concern me, however. The maximum f/stop becomes f/14, and in muted light, even with the excellent Topaz software (DeNoise and Sharpen), maintaining quality is tough. My settings for this shot were 1/500, f/10, 1000 ISO.