Usually midday lighting and a clear blue sky is detrimental to good outdoor photography. In this particular case, the harsh overhead sunlight was perfect. This is a sacred ibis about to land on a palm tree in Cape Town, and the transillumination through the wings was beautiful. I should have used a faster shutter speed to freeze the tips of the wings, but I still like the shot a lot. My settings were 1/1000, f/7.1, and 400 ISO. Because I was using a 100-500mm Canon telephoto, the birds were in and out of the viewfinder in fractions of a second due to the narrow field of view. That meant I didn't have the time or the coordination to trigger the autofocus mechanism, so I prefocused on a distance I thought would work given the flight paths of most of the birds in the rookery. In post-processing, I opened up the shadows a little to show more detail in the bird's ventral side.
0 Comments