The picture I wanted most to take on the Peruvian photo tour is this one. This striking and, admittedly, strange looking bird is named ‘Cock of the Rock’. It is found in thick jungle vegetation which makes it a challenge to photograph without having distracting branches and leaves obscuring the bird. Besides obstructions, the other difficulty is that in the morning and late afternoon, when these birds are most active, the light level is extremely low. It can easily be three f/stops darker than an area open to the sky. I used 700mm of focal length – the Canon 100-500mm telephoto plus a 1.4x converter—and the maximum lens aperture available to me was f/10. The shutter speed had to be fairly fast to assure sharp pictures with such a long lens, and that pushed the ISO up. My settings were 1/250, f/10, and 8000 ISO. I would have liked a faster speed, but I wanted to keep the ISO relatively reasonable. Everything In photography is a trade-off. I could have replaced the background with a more simple, out of focus foliage backdrop but I wanted you to get a sense of the challenge of photographing in the jungle.
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