Almost!

When people look at my pictures (or many wildlife photographers) often a comment will be made about “How I must have a good camera”. Yes, I do, but that is not “reason” behind a good or compelling or interesting photo. iPhones are capable of taking amazing shots. What makes my camera different than the iPhone? One thing is the frame rate. That is how many shots per second does it take. My camera is capable of taking 20 shots per second. Each of these pictures is almost 50 megabytes in size. Huge files. That is the computer-processing equivalent of your iPhone taking 1000 shots per second. Does that matter? Yes, it does. This picture is of White-winged Swallows that were sitting on a log in an oxbow lake in Peru. Periodically one or both of them would fly out, capture an insect above the water and then return to the log. I attempted to catch the birds as they took off. Unfortunately I did not have my camera set at its highest frame rate and so did not capture the best shot. A millisecond before this shot was taken, the bird taking off turned and looked at me-it would have been a much more compelling shot. Had I been shooting at 20 FPS, I might have captured a much better shot.