This is a keel-billed toucan I photographed in Costa Rica. It seems to me that having such a huge beak on a bird's face would be exceedingly awkward, but obviously there are many toucan species in the world and they all seem to be doing just fine. Since depth of field is so shallow with long lenses, the only way to get a good shot of one of these birds is when they are looking either left or right; in other words, their beak has to be as parallel as possible with the plane of the digital sensor. I used an f/9 lens aperture in the hope both the limb and the toucan would be sharp, and I was gratified they are. I took this with a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto, and the other settings were 1/125 and 1000 ISO. I really should have used a faster shutter, but a perched toucan doesn't move very fast and therefore I was able to take a tack sharp image. I used a tripod, and the wild toucan was attracted to my lodge in the Costa Rican jungle by the food bait we offered it.
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