I posted this picture three years ago, but I wanted to revisit it because it remains one of my favorite images from Patagonia. This is an Andean condor, and it was a thrill to see them flying free in Argentina. I lived most of my life in California, and the California condor -- the largest land bird in North America -- was frequently in the news in the 80's and 90's. It went extinct in the wild in 1987, but through careful breeding programs it's captive numbers have increased and it has been reintroduced back into the wild. At this time, there are almost 300 condors in the wild in Arizona, Utah, and California. In Argentina, one day my photo tour group and I saw an astonishing 9 Andean condors flying around, what we assumed, was an animal carcass. It was too far to see it clearly, but the birds were flying over our heads. What a thrill. I used a 500mm f/4 Canon lens plus a 1.4x teleconverter to fill as much of the frame as possible (with 700mm), and that meant it was impossible to render the background in focus. Therefore, I composited the spectacular mountains in the background to produce an image that really conveys how amazing this area is. My settings for the condor shot were 1/2000, f/8, and 1250 ISO.
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