This is another shot I really wanted here in Costa Rica, and it happened by accident. We were shooting hummingbirds on the terrace of our lodge, which was built on a cliff overlooking the cloud forest below, when my local guide spotted a resplendent quetzal perched on a branch about 700 feet below us. My 500mm focal length really wasn’t long enough, but I had no choice. I didn’t have time to add my 1.4x teleconverter for fear the quetzal might fly away. The loss of light (one f/stop) that would have occurred from the use of a teleconverter wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway because of the low light level. The bird suddenly took flight, and at 20 fps I was able to get a few good frames from this unique angle. To fill a significant part of the composition, I cropped the image from 128 megs down to 43 megs. My settings were 1/2500, f/7.1, and 8000 ISO. As you can tell from the ISO, the light level was quite low. I used Topaz DeNoise to mitigate the unwanted noise followed by Topaz Sharpen, and then I used Topaz Gigapixel; a 2x enlargement increased the resolution to 172 megs.
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