A stunning bird

Among photographers, this is the most sought after bird in Africa. It is a lilac-breasted roller, and when it flies, it's a breathtaking splash of brilliant blue. Every time I go to Africa, I'm always on the lookout for them because you can't have enough pictures of these beautiful birds, particularly in flight. This one was fairly close -- I used a 280mm focal length -- and the settings were 1/3200, f/8, and 1600 ISO. With small birds, you can't comprise on the shutter speed if you want sharp images. Raise the ISO to whatever heights are required and mitigate the noise in post-processing. Wing tips, especially, require at least 1/3200 of a second to be rendered sharply. In this particular situation, the sun was at my back. That provided enough light so my ISO didn't have to be super high.