This is a blue grosbeak I photographed at the feeder outside my office window. Notice how sharp this is. What's interesting about this shot is that I took the picture through glass. I cleaned the window well, of course, but I didn't open it because any movement on my part would spook the bird. I set up a Ground-Roof-Window-Pod (it's like a flat tripod that holds a ballhead -- it's made for shooting out of a hatch in the roof while on safari) on my desk and mounted the camera with a Canon 500mm f/4 lens and a 1.4x teleconverter. This gave me 700mm of focal length. Because the distance between the grosbeak and the lens was about 10 feet, I couldn't focus on it. So, I added an extension tube between the teleconverter and the camera body, and now focusing on the bird was possible. My settings were 1/125, f/8, and 250 ISO. I took this shot in 2007 when noise was still a series issue. Had I taken this today with the Canon R5, I would have used a much faster shutter and an aperture like f/16. As it turned out, though, the bird was motionless for a moment and I had enough depth of field even with such a long lens.
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