Happy Mother’s Day! – this photo is dedicated to all those mother’s out there who seem to be able to ‘run on water’ with their amazing ability to manage the kids, the household, careers and hobbies all with a smile 🙂

I took this photo the other day at the creek near my house.

Totally unplanned…

I had just taken some creek photos and was relaxing looking over the water when I saw this colorful bird cruising on the surface at the corner of my eye.

I slowly reached for my camera so as not to startle the bird (fortunately I had my 70-200mm f/28L lens on my Canon 5D Mark III at the time).

By the time I had my right hand on the camera, ready to pick it up, I saw our dog Bali (the Australian Shepard / Border Collie mix) charging towards the creek in the left corner of my view…

She had spotted the Common Merganser on the water – leaving me all of 1 or 2 seconds to get the camera to my eye and snap off a few shots.

I managed to get 4 shots as the bird took flight from the water. The one above was the best.

The ISO was really low – set at 100. Typically for action photography I would choose an ISO of 400-1600 to get a faster Shutter Speed.

As it turns out my camera was set to Aperture priority (which I recommend leaving your camera on) and set to Aperture f/3.5 and the Meganser was in the sun so I had a Shutter Speed of 1/320 sec. This gave me a reasonably fast shutter speed but you can still notice some movement blur as I was zoomed in at 200mm.

Panning with the bird, as it ran on the water, did help keep it in fairly good focus. But you will notice some blurring which I find gives a better feeling of motion.

This is the track and pan method I describe in my “Shutter Speed” video of the DSLR Basics Module in my EasyDSLR Digital Photography Course (Blue Membership).

If you want to learn this method…

OR are just a little curious about what else is in the course then head over to my >Special for Blue Membership here< This Special is for limited time – click the link to see how much time is remaining.