Fit to burst

Your camera's burst mode is a big help with action shots. Will Cheung shows how to make the most of this key feature without hitting the buffer

Will Cheung 

Veteran photography journalist Will Cheung has seen huge technological advances, especially with AF and burst shooting. Combine the two and the potential for wonderful shots is beyond imagination.

Afraction of a second is very brief in terms of time but A it's the photographically difference between success or failure. Success means capturing that fleeting smile of a newborn, the ball leaving the face of the racquet or a bird in flight with its wings in the perfect position. Failure means hitting the delete key.

There is skill to getting a perfectly timed shot, whether that is catching a magical moment or pushing the shutter button at the instant key elements of a composition come together to make an engaging image.

This is what master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called 'the decisive moment' and what he achieved was incredible when you consider that he used a film camera with significant shutter lag.

For modern-day image-makers the decisive moment still applies and we are privileged in having at our disposal digital cameras that have minimal shutter lag and have burst or continuous shooting settings that enable us to take a stream of consecutive images at rapid speeds.

By comparison, a pro film camera could rip through a 36-exposure film in seven seconds at five frames-per-second (fps), and then you had to reload. With digital, depending on the camera, battery capacity, shutter speed and memory card you can blast away and take, literally, thousands upon thousands of pictures in super-quick time, and all for free. The latest cameras can shoot full-size raw files at 15, 20, 30 and 50fps with autoexposure and autofocus tracking (AE/AF), and those amazing speeds can be sustained for quite a few shots.

Fast shooters