Re: Getting the photo vs the experience of getting the photo
Regarding blink-and-miss-it photography and the notion that using burst is a skill-free approach, if you think that I doubt if you’ve done it successfully.
I photograph birds in flight in the winter. Having burst mode in my cameras did not help me much when I started — perhaps I got more frames of birds half in the shot or birds doing dumb stuff. I lacked the skills to use the feature effectively.
Today, I sometimes use burst mode for bird photography, though I’m selective about that. But it is far more than a mater of machine gunning as birds fly past. As a track a group of birds I’m consciously aware of layers of stuff. First of all, I have to keep a bird under the AF region. But more than that, I have to think about what that bird is doing. And about what other birds around it are doing. Whether one is blocking another bird’s head. How they are arranged relative to one another as they fly, and how that is constantly changing. How they align with background elements — trees, clouds, etc. — as the y move. What direction the light is coming from.
If you think that is just about burst mode, I challenge any manual-only person who thinks burst makes it easy to give it a try and see how they do… and how much practice it takes to do it well.
Mar 08, 2026 at 10:49 AM
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