White skies

This is the most famous bird in Africa among photographers -- the exquisite lilac-breasted roller. I photographed this one in Kenya. Usually, I avoid solid white backgrounds behind subjects, and if I can't avoid them, I replace those backgrounds with something complimentary to the subject or, at the very least, with elements that are non-distracting. In this instance, though, I left the white background because I felt it focuses all our attention on the amazing colors that make this species so sought-after by photographers on safari. I shot this with a 500mm f/4 Canon lens plus a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me 700mm of focal length. My settings were 1/125 f/5.6, and 320 ISO. I took this in 2008 with a Canon 5D Mark II, and I was afraid of using a high ISO at the time due to the noise. That's why the shutter is much slower than it should have been (I was using a bean bag to stabilize the long lens. Today, I would have used 1/1000th of a second and not been concerned with using an ISO in the 2500 range because my current camera is much better and because of Neat Image software to mitigate noise.