Avian portrait

This is a male African firefinch I photographed from a water-level blind in South Africa. One of the main advantages of shooting like this is the ability to capture such a low perspective.  That makes for an intimate portrait from an angle we almost never see. I used a 500mm telephoto plus a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me 700mm of focal length.  That made the background completely undefined, forcing all the attention on the bird.  Notice how rich the colors are; contrary to what many people think, colors are naturally saturated in photographs when the subject is illuminated with diffused light.  The settings were 1/500, f/10, and 3200 ISO.