On my first night in the Peruvian Amazon, I took my photo tour group went out in a boat in search of Caiman. I've photographed caiman several times, but never at night. My guide had a powerful spotlight, and we could easily see the reptiles because their eyes reflected the light and glowed a brilliant yellow. The light level was still low, and my high ISO was necessary in order to have a fast enough shutter speed for a sharp picture. Since I hadn't done any test shots with this particular spotlight -- and I couldn't guesstimate the distances we'd be shooting -- I relied on my camera's meter to judge the exposure and then, if necessary, tweaked it until I liked the results. My settings for this shot were 1/400, f/7.1 (which is the maximum aperture of the Canon 100-500mm zoom when fully extended), and 12,800 ISO. This is a significantly cropped picture -- from 128 megabytes down to 8 megs. I then applied Topaz Gigapixel AI to increase the file size followed by Topaz DeNoise AI and Topaz Sharpen AI.
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