Reflections

I photographed this red-billed oxpecker in South Africa at a blind shooting through one-way glass. Shooting from such a low perspective makes all the difference. In the dim light of dusk, the man-made pond had two floodlight, one on either side of the water, that provided enough light to shoot. Still, the ISO had to be high. A year and a half agoI traded my Canon 500m f/4 lens for a 100-500mm zoom because of the weight, and also because of the compositional flexibility with the zoom, but the price I paid was the maximum aperture -- f/7.1 instead of f/4. In post-processing, though, I used Topaz DeNoise to vastly improve the quality of the image. My settings were 1/500, f/7.1, and 8000 ISO.