Photo Tip
One of the really great things about shooting digital is that once you have purchased the camera, shooting pictures is completely free. I find this to be a huge bonus because it allows one to be much more experimental and adventurous than when shooting film as costs with film can mount up very quickly if you’re not careful.
Take the other night when we were shooting wild dogs hunting for instance. After all the action has come to an end, it was pretty dark and the dogs we looking for a place to spend the night. They were running about, twittering in that strange bird-like way of theirs (click here to listen to them) and most Buffalo Ridge Lodge guests that were with us had put their cameras away thinking it was all over for the night. Not so! I upped the ISO on the camera (another advantage of digital is that you can change ISO on the fly) to 1600 and blazed away at the playing dogs. The new Nikon D3s, by the way has a top ISO ove over 100 000 – just imagine what you can do with that! Now, under these conditions many of your images will be failures but if you do crack it – when you crack it – you can end up with some really interesting and appealing images. The pic below was shot at ½ sec at f5.6 with the ISO set to 1600. You like it? Maybe, maybe not. I do and it will probably be in our Wild Dog Book!
Wild Dog (Lycaon pictus) running at night
