I captured this stunning lilac-breasted roller in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. It is uncropped, and I used a Canon 500mm f/4 lens along with a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 700mm of focal length. The original sky was white, and although I still thought the image worked nicely, the cloudy sky is much more impactful. I used the new Sky Replacement feature in Photoshop to make that happen. I took the picture of the bird in 2008 when noise was still a serious issue, and that’s why I used such a low ISO of 320. That, in turn, forced my aperture to be large. As a result, the face of the roller wasn’t tack sharp due to the shallow depth of field of such a long lens (I focused on the chest feathers). Therefore, I selected the head using the lasso tool and sharpened it so the eyes appeared sharper than they were in the original. My settings were 1/160 and f/5.6. The shutter speed was much too slow but, as I said, I purposely held the ISO down to minimize noise. In 2008, there weren't any good software programs to eliminate noise.
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