The resplendent quetzal

The number one picture I was hoping to get in Costa Rica was a resplendent quetzal in flight. The birds are simply stunning.  Just seeing one isn’t guaranteed, and to catch it on the wing is a serious challenge.  I was able to get only one frame of it in the air while shooting 14 frames a second. For a large bird, it’s incredibly fast.  I didn’t think I had captured it at all because instead of flying high, it came out of an invisible place in the tree and dropped like a bullet into a nearby ravine. I hadn’t anticipated that.  The background is obviously very busy and distracting, but when the quetzal flew out of the tree, it stayed just a foot or two from the leaves which made it impossible to blur the background even with a telephoto.  Because it flew down into the ravine, I had no chance to photograph it against the sky.  This is a situation where choosing the right autofocus settings are irrelevant because it’s hard just to keep it in the frame, let alone focus on it.  I pre-focused on a place where I hoped the flight path would be and didn’t even try to focus as the bird flew. I also zoomed the lens back to 230mm because I knew it would be easier to get a sharp picture if the composition wasn’t so tight. That meant I’d have to crop the picture for a full frame image, but the choice was no picture or a cropped one. My shutter speed here was 1/2500th of a second, and I hand held the Canon 1Dx Mark II and a 100-400mm zoom. Note that the quetzal has a wild avocado in its beak.