The magnificent condor

Andean condors are a fairly common sight in Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia, Chile. I used to live in California where the desperate attempts to rescue the California condor from extinction often made the news, so to see the condors in Chile doing well is a welcome sight. It’s hard to get a photograph, though, that shows the beautiful black and white markings on the wings because the high-flying condors are usually seen as silhouettes against a bright sky. When my photo tour group and I first arrived in the park, we came upon six condors flying in close proximity, so we stopped to photograph them. One of the birds for a brief moment angled its body so I could capture the dorsal side of the wings. I took this image with a 100-400mm along with a 1.4 teleconverter and had to crop it to make the bird a significant part of the frame. The sky photographed white even though I could see texture and detail in the thin clouds, so I took a separate exposure of the sun that was trying to break through the overcast. I then decreased the exposure and combined that with the mountain picture for drama. My settings were 1/640, f/11, and 400 ISO. I normally use a faster shutter speed (and higher ISO) for birds in flight, but the large condors hardly flap their wings because they are so skilled at riding the wind.