I never get tired of the birds in Florida. Big birds, little birds, social birds, solitary birds, birds that sound like dinosaurs. So many birds. And DAK takes it up to another level. While the tigers and gorillas on the different walking trails in the park are awesome, I always end up spending the most time in the aviaries with their bird guide in one hand and a camera in the other. According to the guide for this area, these are Pied Imperial Pigeons. Same family as doves, and they look so much like them.
Even zoomed out to 200mm, my 200-600mm lens only goes to f/5.6, and for some reason my shutter was set to 1/2000 seconds when this moment happened. (I assume the setting was left over from a brighter area beforehand, since this little corner is the first thing you see as you round into the aviary section.) In any event, my ISO settled at an unfortunate 10000 because of the oversight, but no harm done—we can make lemonade from theses lemons. High ISO makes for lots of noise which makes for a grainy, old-school film feel. So I just leaned into that vibe with my color grading and enjoyed the frozen in time look of our friend that we got from the quick shutter.
As much as I loved the resulting coloring, I also fell in love with the photograph in black & white, so I offered that option, too. I've come close to doing a black & white option many times before so it was interesting to see the response to it.