What I find remarkable about this image is the lighting. I shot this a few days ago at the end of my photo tour to New Mexico. The sun had risen seconds before I took this, and as the sandhill cranes took flight and were several feet above the ground, the golden light illuminated the birds but hadn't touched the background yet. About 10 to 15 seconds later, all of the reeds behind the birds were also lit with morning's first light. It was the contrast seen here that makes this such a strong image. Would I have preferred a beautiful, in-focus background? Yes, but the fact that the landscape behind the cranes is relatively dark makes this work for me. I would have preferred to use 1/3200 as the shutter speed, but I didn't have enough light and, since these birds are slow fliers, I felt I could get away with 1/1600 and still have sharp wing tips. My settings, then, were 1/1600, f/7.1 (the largest aperture at 500mm on my 100-500mm Canon zoom), and 4000 ISO. I used Topaz Photo AI in post-processing to mitigate noise and to sharpen the image.
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