American pygmy kingfisher

This is an American pygmy kingfisher I photographed in the Pantanal region of Brazil. I took the picture from a boat handholding the camera with a 500mm f/4 lens along with a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 700mm of focal length. My shutter speed of 1/400th of a second should have been faster, but this shot was taken in 2014 when noise was much more of a concern than it is today. The aperture was f/7.1 and the ISO 2000. Since the bird was perched, I felt I could get away with the relatively slow shutter. With telephoto lenses, the general rule is the shutter speed should be the reciprocal of the focal length of the lens, or faster. This means if the lens being used is 700mm, the shutter should be at least 1/700 for a sharp picture. My choice was a compromise between noise and sharpness. Fortunately, the picture is sharp. In post-processing, I used Topaz DeNoise AI and Topaz Sharpen AI, and this image is cropped about 50%. These are very small birds -- they weigh between 10 to 16 grams. At most, that's a half ounce.