I took this shot of a Cape buffalo in Africa from an overnight blind situated perfectly at water-level. I was shooting through a one-way glass so the animals couldn't see me and the other members of my photo tour, but that cost me one f/stop of light. The first few rays of sunrise lighting were still quite weak when I took this, hence the extremely high ISO. Even with post-processing techniques for mitigating noise and sharpening the image, at this kind of ISO there was a degradation of image quality. Still, I was able to get the image. In the days when I was still shooting film, this would have been completely impossible without flash due to the extremely low illumination. My settings were 1/500, f/7.1, and 20,000 ISO. Notice how dramatic, and intimate, a portrait of an animal is when shooting from such a low perspective.
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