This is an African white pelican I captured from a boat in Walvis Bay, Namibia. Pelicans follow the boat because we throw them small fish, and this provides great opportunities to capture frame-filling images with medium telephotos and, sometimes, even with wide angle lenses. This picture is uncropped. I used a 70-200mm lens set to 70mm for the shot. Notice the depth of field in that the wing extended toward the camera is sharp. That happened only because I used f/11 as the aperture. My other settings were 1/1250 and 500 ISO. With modern cameras and excellent software like Topaz DeNoise, we can now raise the ISO until we have fast shutters and small apertures for sharp pictures with extensive depth of field. In this particular situation, I had plenty of light. Had the sky been overcast or if this were taken before sunrise, my ISO would have been much higher. When I first went digital in 2005, 3200 ISO was unusable because it was impossibly noisy. Now, I don't hesitate to shoot with 10,000 ISO.
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