The big splash

There are five types of kingfishers in the Pantanal region of Brazil, and this is one of them. It is a ringed kingfisher, and in this shot it struck the surface of the river in hopes of catching a fish. These birds are extremely fast, so to catch every nuance of the action – including the remarkable splash pattern – I used 1/3200th of a second for the shutter speed. I also used f/8 for the lens aperture thinking that birds have depth and I wanted at least a little depth of field. Due to the overcast sky, the light was quite low. That forced my ISO to 8000. In post-processing I applied Topaz DeNoise AI and then Topaz Sharpen AI to mitigate noise and to make the image look as sharp as possible. I was using a frame rate of 20 frames per second. The next Pantanal photo tour I'm leading that's still available is early December 2025.