This picture taught me something important. This is a monk parakeet from the Pantanal region of Brazil, and they are extremely fast fliers. The only way I could get a picture of one was to prefocus at the nest and wait for a bird to return and flutter just outside the opening before entering. When they take off from the next, they are like bullets and virtually impossible to catch. I was using a Canon 500mm f/4 along with a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me 700mm of focal length. I was able to get a few shots of birds in the frame, but none of them were tack sharp. The only possible explanation was that the depth of field of a 700mm lens, especially given that the camera position was only about 30 feet away, was so shallow that the focus was off just enough to be a problem. Remember, I was refocusing on a spot where I assumed birds would flutter. Therefore, I took off the teleconverter, and finally I was getting sharp images. Depth of field with a 500mm lens is slightly more than with a 700mm lens, and that made the difference. I had to crop the image to fill a significant part of the frame, but I used Topaz Sharpen AI to help maintain quality. My settings were 1/6400, f/11, and 4000 ISO.
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