This very strange bird is a boat-billed heron that I captured in Costa Rica. It was quite far away, so I used a Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto plus a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 700mm of focal length. Because the rainforest was so dark, I was forced to use a shutter speed much too slow for using such a long lens -- 1/60. I used a tripod because there was no chance for a tack sharp picture with such a slow shutter and this kind of magnification. I took this in 2011 when noise was a much more serious problem than it is now, so I kept the ISO low to 400. The original background was very busy and distracting, so I replaced it with an image of out of focus foliage. Now the bird isn’t competing with myriad leaves and branches in the background. My f/stop was f/8.
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