Bird bath

This is a roseate spoonbill taking a bath in Myakka River State Park, Florida. I used my medium format film camera for this shot because in the early 2000's I hadn't switched to digital yet. The fastest shutter speed on the Mamiya RZ 67 was 1/400th of a second, hence some of the bird action is blurred. I used the 500mm Mamiya telephoto lens which was equivalent to a 300mm in the full frame digital format we use now. This picture is uncropped. My settings were unrecorded, but I definitely would have shot wide open -- f/5.6 -- and for all birds and wildlife back then I used 100 ISO -- Fujichrome Provia 100 slide film. In retrospect, this seems primitive. One hundred ISO for wildlife is ridiculous by today's standards, and a shutter speed of 1/400 is also crazy. I could have shot 35mm for wildlife, but I stubbornly stuck with 6x7cm medium format because I felt it gave me a competitive edge with photo buyers. The transparencies were so much larger than 35mm, hence they reproduced in print -- magazines, posters, fine art prints, etc. -- with superior sharpness.