Green-barred woodpecker

For every picture you take, depth of field is an important consideration. It becomes especially important when (1) using a long telephoto lens, (2) when the camera position is close to the subject and/or foreground, and (3) when light levels are low. When I photographed this green-barred woodpecker in the Pantanal region of Brazil, I had to deal with all three. You can tell by my camera settings (1/3200, f/10, and 6400 ISO) that I chose a moderate amount of depth of field to hold focus on both the bird and most of the tree trunk, and I used a fast shutter because the bird was constantly in motion. In post-processing, I applied Neat Image software to mitigate the noise, and as you can see this image shows no noise at all. This woodpecker made a nest just 10 feet from one of the rooms in the lodge I used. I was shooting from about 12 feet away with 700mm of focal length -- a 500mm telephoto plus a 1.4x teleconverter.