These flamingos were in the midst of a breeding ritual in Lake Nakuru, Kenya. There used to be 2 to 3 million birds here, and from a distance the water in the lake look pink. Then for 8 years they disappeared because of the rising water level, but now they've started to return. Flamingos rarely allow a close approach, and as you slowly move closer to the flock to get a frame-filling shot, they just as slowly move away from you. So, to get this tight shot of the birds, I used a 2X teleconverter on my Canon 500mm f/4 telephoto giving me 1000mm of focal length. Because depth of field is so shallow with this much magnification, I used f/13 to try and hold focus on most of the flock. I should have used a faster shutter, but I took this picture in 2008 when I was shooting the Canon 1Ds Mark II, my first professional digital camera. Noise was a serious issue with this body. Pictures above 1000 ISO were worthless, so I kept the ISO to 200. That meant even in bright light, the shutter at 1/640th of a second couldn't be as fast as I would use today. I used a tripod to steady the heavy camera and lens.
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