Kingfishers are usually not approachable to within a few feet, but this Amazon kingfisher in the Pantanal region of Brazil allowed my boat to come within 10 to 12 feet. I used a 500mm Canon telephoto along with an extension tube for close focusing, and the picture is uncropped. My settings were 1/1000, f/4, and 4000 ISO. I waited for the bird to turn its head so that long beak was parallel to the plane of the digital sensor. I knew that shooting with the long lens the depth of field -- especially at this very close distance with a large lens aperture -- was extremely shallow. Had the beak been pointed toward the camera, it would have been out of focus. That's not what I wanted at all. I used a fast shutter speed even though the kingfisher was perched because I was shooting from a boat and birds can flick their heads to the side so fast that I didn’t want to chance taking a blurred picture.
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