These beautiful birds are superb starlings. They are commonly seen in east and south Africa, but I had never seen so many gathered in one tree as I did here, in Kenya. I used a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto, and the challenge was to get as many birds in focus as possible. You can see they are on different planes, and that created a depth of field headache. I shot this in 2007 with my first serious digital camera, the Canon 1Ds Mark II, and noise was a problem in those years even with ISO settings of 1000 and above (3200 ISO was completely unusable). Therefore, I tried to shoot with low ISO settings, and that dictated how high my shutter could be and the size of the f/stop. My settings were 1/320, f/4.5, and 200 ISO. Today, with my current 1Dx Mark II, I would be able to use a faster shutter and an aperture of f/16. The far right bird was the most out of focus, and I used Topaz DeNoise AI to make it sharper.
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