Thanks for the kind comments. I'd like to say I had to sit for three days deep in the jungle, shivering cold and covered in leeches to get this shot. Well it was cold all right, but I was just sitting on the jetty outside La Selva Lodge in Ecuador. A fantastic place, but constant rain and high water levels had made most of the local specialities hard to find while I was there, let alone photograph (in fact I did see/hear most of them after a lot of hard work with Rodrigo from the lodge). There were some easy Hoatzins around the place, though, and I must have taken hundreds of shots of them close up, far away, in groups etc., all in terrible postures and terrible light with fussy, leafy backgrounds with bits of sky coming through, yuck! When this one came down to drink, I nearly didn't bother, because it was quite dark. However, one of the nice things about lack of direct sunlight seems to be that dark colours tend to come out quite nicely against dark backgrounds (another is the lack of human disturbance ...). So I propped the 500 mm up on a wooden post and fired off a few megabytes at 400 iso, f4 and a shutter speed of around 1/500 s, and that's about it ...
ATB
Christopher