CANON EOS SKILLS - CAPTURE THE ACTION

Never miss the moment again with our 21 tips for great action photos from our Canon pro sports and wildlife photographers

Action photography in genres like sports and wildlife, where you often need lightning-fast reflexes to capture fleeting moments as a high-speed subject zooms past your lens, will really put your skills to the test.

That being said, the challenge is half the fun! There’s no greater feeling than when overcoming all odds to get the perfect image. This month, we get insight from four top Canon pros Drew Buckley, Marc Aspland, Martin Bissig and Drew Gibson. Between them, these pros have shot everything from puffins on Skomer island in Wales to mountain biking races in Pakistan, World Endurance Championship racing, the Olympics and more.

Read on to see how you can perfect your autofocus technique; uncover the Canon settings you need for razor-sharp images; when to slow down your shutter speed; how to incorporate ash; and nd the gear you need to get started.

WILDLIFE PHOTOS DREW BUCKLEY

Our Canon pro’s tips on how to take award-winning nature-in-action photos

Freeze action with a rapid shutter speed

01 USING A fast shutter speed of 1/3200 sec enabled me to capture this red squirrel frozen in mid-flight, jumping between branches. Coupled with the blistering 16fps continuous drive mode on the Canon EOS-1D X Mark II, meant I had a multitude of images from the sequence to choose from – I picked the one where the squirrel’s eyes were on the focus plane. I was shooting with an EF 500mm IS lens and with low light in the woodland, so I had to use a wide-open aperture of f/4 and bump the ISO to 2500 – enabling a faster shutter speed. Ultimately, this freezes movement, rendering the subject pin-sharp and banishing any blur.