I photographed this red-and-yellow barbet in Ethiopia. It was on top of a termite mound, and in order to fill a decent amount of the frame with the bird, I used a 100-500mm Canon zoom along with a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me 700mm of focal length. The disadvantage of using the teleconverter is a one f/stop loss of light. With a lens that's fairly slow like the 100-500mm zoom (which is f/7.1 at 500mm), that puts the maximum aperture at f/10. That accounts for the fairly high ISO of 1600, but today in terms of noise that's like shooting 200 ISO 30 years ago. The shutter speed was 1/3200 because I was hoping to get a shot of the barbet in flight. That didn't happen, but the bird is so pretty that I'm happy with this shot.
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