This picture is a testament to the advances in technology that we photographers now have at our fingertips. This is a female red-legged honeycreeper about to land on a feeder at a lodge in Costa Rica. It was very dark in the late afternoon under the canopy of the rainforest, but I needed a fast shutter speed to freeze the wings. For small birds, I prefer a shutter of 1/3200, but in this situation I was forced to compromise and set the camera to 1/2500 -- which is why the wing tips are soft. The ISO was an astonishing 25,600, and as you would expect, the original capture was extremely noisy. It seemed like the giant noise obscured the real image. In addition, the honeycreeper was very small in the frame even though I was using a Canon 500mm f/4 lens (set to f/6.3). In post-processing, the first thing I did was to crop the image so the bird filled much of the frame, and then I used Topaz Gigapixel AI to res it back up to a respectable size. I then applied Topaz DeNoise AI, and magically the noise disappeared. Just a handful of years ago, this would have been impossible; I never could have ended up with an image like this in such a dark environment. My next photo tour to Costa Rica is in May, 2024.
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