It’s very hot and humid today in the Amazon here in Peru. Mornings, though, are delightfully cool and that’s when we traveled upriver for a half hour and then walked through the dense jungle on an easy trail to set up our gear in a comfortable blind to photograph red and green macaws, several species of parrots and a variety of parakeets. Every day they are drawn to this ‘clay lick’, an embankment that offers several types of minerals they apparently need. This is a great opportunity to capture birds in flight, and it’s unique in that the birds congregate in large numbers. Once in a while a bird would sound an alarm, and hundreds of colorful birds would take off in unison. Here, you can see the red and green macaws at the clay lick. I would have preferred diffused light, but with early morning direct sunlight, interesting shadows were created by outstretched wings. My settings were 1/3200, f/9, and 2000 ISO. I use a 100-500mm Canon zoom plus a 1.4x teleconverter. This shot was made at 660mm.
0 Comments