A commonly seen bird in eastern and southern Africa is the superb starling. They usually don’t allow a close approach, but in this instance I got lucky. Still, I took this photograph with a Canon 500mm f/4 lens plus a 2x teleconverter giving me 1000mm of focal length, and what you see here is completely uncropped. I shot this in 2007 with my first serious digital camera, the Canon 1Ds Mark II, and noise was a serious problem back then for images above 1000 ISO. That’s why I used 200 ISO for this shot, and that dictated a shutter speed slower than I like for birds -- 1/320. Had I taken this today with my current camera, I would have taken this with 800 ISO which, in turn, would have allowed me to boost the shutter to 1/1250. The front lighting from an early morning sun brought out the iridescent colors in the feathers. Note that with a relatively low lighting angle, the eye was illuminated fully. My lens aperture was f/9, and as always, I use daylight white balance for virtually all of my outdoor exposures.
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