I spent two hours trying to get this shot. This is a monk parakeet, small beautiful bird in the Pantanal region of Brazil. They fly like bullets -- so fast there is was no way any camera system could follow focus on them. It's virtually impossible to keep them in the viewfinder with a telephoto lens. The only way I could get a picture like this was when they would fly back to the nest and, once in a while, hover for a second or two before entering. I prefocused on a spot where I assumed they would hover. At first I tried shooting with 700mm of focal length -- a 500mm telephoto plus a 1.4x teleconverter. I was able to get some shots, but they weren't sharp because the depth of field was too shallow. So, I removed the teleconverter and that's when I started to get sharp pictures. The parakeet was smaller in the frame though, and I had to crop the image quite a bit. My settings were 1/6400, f/8, and 4000 ISO. I used Neat Image software to reduce the noise.
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