Pygmy Kingfisher

Here's an image from our most recent Ecuador tour. This was taken at Napo Wildlife Center in the Ecuadorian Amazon where we photographed 4 of the 5 possible kingfisher species. I have to say Napo Wildlife Center is one of the best lodges that I've been to in terms of comfort, hospitality and the way it's run.

The photography in the rain forest is not always easy though as you can see from the techs of this shot. At first I used flash at 1/60 of a second and a lower iso to make sure I got at least one sharp image but then I decided to take some natural light images, this being one of those. It was taken from a large canoe. Despite being a good exposure it was fairly noisy so I ran a bit of noise reduction on the whole image in ACR, I find if you use only the color noise setting (not the luminance) and you leave detail set to 90, it does a good job of taking out the background noise while leaving the details of the bird and branches. I'm not keen on the one oof branch that runs the entire length of the image but clean settings are difficult on these forest streams. It's about 75% of the original file.

7D 500F4 1/25 F4, iso 800