Male Red-bellied Woodpecker

Male Red-bellied Woodpecker

The red-bellied woodpecker visits the feeder pretty regularly, but it just grabs a quick bite and flies off to a nearby tree — close enough to see, but much too far to get a photo of.

One rainy day, however, he hung around for a while and let me get this photo. He was the only bird around that day. You can see the raindrops on his feathers, and along the middle of the right edge you can even see a blurred raindrop going by.

The rainy, cloudy day meant it was pretty dark. It was surprisingly dark, in fact: I shot this at ISO 1600, f5.6, 1/125 second, which is about four EV lower than just about every other bird photo I’ve shot recently!

See the original on Flickr.