Strategies for CAPTURING ACTION A
ction photography isn’t easy. Fast moving subjects present good compositions in fractions of a second, sometimes never to be repeated. The interaction years ago between my great Pyrenees and my newly adopted cocker spaniel puppy, below, shows a fearless pup not concerned at all with a gaping mouth that could shallow him whole! This moment lasted for probably a tenth of a second, and to capture something like this a lot of things had to come together: Hand-eye coordination, the shutter speed de-
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cision, the f/stop choice for depth of field, the autofocus mode, the number of focus points, an awareness of the background, the exposure for a white subject, and the frame rate. What follows is my thought process for rendering fast moving subjects with sharpness. Creatively blurring action shots is a valid approach if that’s what you want, but in my opinion it’s much more rewarding artistically and technically (and more difficult) to capture the action with tack sharp clarity.
