I had seen photos of yellow-shafted Northern Flickers in flight with their wings spread and loved the photos. On a Saturday in September, I was walking in the woods and saw a Pileated Woodpecker high up in the trees. I tried to get a photo of it in flight- when I looked at the photo, it was not sharp. My shutter speed was only 1/2500s. The next day while I was walking in the woods, I saw some

Northern Flickers. I wanted to try to get a flight shot, so I raised my shutter speed to 1/3200s, Auto ISO, Manual mode. The trees blocked out a lot of light, so I knew my ISO would be quite high. I got the shot and it appeared acceptably sharp- not too much noise.

I looked at the file- The ISO was 12,800! I used Neat Image Pro Noise Reduction software to process the photo and the photo was beautiful. I remembered those photos of flickers and was happy to have my own.

Pam