Great blue heron in flight

Of the various wing positions you can capture when great blue herons fly, this is my favorite -- the wings down and forward. On this particular afternoon, the sunset we'd hoped to capture didn't materialize. Instead, a dense overcast sky reduced light on Caddo Lake forcing a high ISO. I prefer to use a shutter speed of 1/3200 with birds in flight, but I just didn't have the light for that. Besides, herons are relatively slow flying birds, so I thought I could get away with 1/2000th of a second. At 500mm of focal length, my aperture with the Canon 100-500mm lens was f/7.1, and the ISO was 12,800. Notice the quality of the image. In post-processing, I used Topaz DeNoise AI followed by Topaz Sharpen AI. Those two plugins have revolutionized photography in that we can now use fast shutter speeds in low light and still have quality images.