Rick Sammon's Digital Photography Secrets

Chapter 4. Picturing Animals

If you want to photograph animals that fly, run, walk or swim in the wild and in zoos or wildlife parks – you've come to the right place. In this chapter, I share my favorite photos from the Arctic to Antarctica, and many places in between.

Stopping Action

One of the cool things about digital SLR cameras (and top of the line compact digital cameras) is that you can control the shutter speed to either stop or blur action.

When I photograph fast-moving animals, and even slow-moving ones, I often choose to freeze the action because I want a sharp shot.

A shutter speed of 1/500^th of a second is usually fast enough to freeze most fast-moving animal action, but when the animal is moving extremely fast, as was this seagull in flight, I had to use a 1/2000^th of a second shutter speed. I learned that through magnifying the previous images on my camera's LCD monitor, and seeing that in the pictures taken at 1/500^th of a second the bird was a bit blurred.

When photographing fast-moving animals, I recommend setting your camera's frame advance to the highest frame-per-second rate possible. Doing so will help ensure a nice photograph of the animal; in this case, one in which one of the seagull's wings was not covering its face.

In addition, you want to set your auto focus mode ...