I photographed this beautiful saffron finch in the Pantanal region of Brazil. Notice the catchlight in the eye of the bird. Many photographers use fill flash when they photograph birds, especially in overcast conditions, because they want to put a dot of light in the eye "to add life to the bird". I think this looks too artificial. In this photograph, the catchlight is reflecting the cloudy sky and it looks completely natural. I captured this shot at the feeder set up by the Lodge where I was staying, and in order to take this frame filling shot -- this is uncropped -- I used a 500mm telephoto along with an extension tube. The extension tube allowed me to focus closer then I normally could with this lens. In addition, I used a 1.4 X teleconverter which magnified the focal length to 700mm. That made the depth of field very shallow, so I used F/13 as my lens adventure. The shutter speed was 1/320, and my ISO was 3200. There is no noise in this image because I used Neat Image software in post-processing.
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