Love birds

This picture of two scarlet macaws looks like it was taken in a zoo or in a bird park. In fact, this was in the wild. There are areas in nature where macaws gather, either for ideal nesting environments (like this one in Brazil), clay licks (like the place I go on my Peruvian photo tour), or a very good food source. With dozens or scores of birds constantly moving about, it's a great opportunity to take wonderful images. I shot this from an elevated vantage point looking downward, and I used a 500mm Canon f/4 telephoto along with a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me 700mm of focal length. I used an f/4 aperture -- i.e. wide open -- but the effective f/stop was f/5.6 because I lost one stop of light due to the teleconverter. The depth of field on the birds shows all of the feather detail sharp because the backs of the birds happened to be parallel with the angled camera back (in other words, parallel with the plane of the sensor). My shutter was 1/640, the ISO was 1250, and I used a tripod with a Wimberly head.