I posted tips on shooting wildlife last week. I mentioned that I often shoot in Shutter Priority Mode. Jason asked in our comments section why I didn’t shoot in Manual Mode and I thought that question would make for a good blog post.

Before I got my first D3, I used to shoot wildlife in Aperture Priority Mode. This was designed to give me both a shallow depth-of-field (which helps make a nice background, isolating the animal) but also defaults to the fastest shutter speed available for any given ISO.

The problem is that the fastest shutter speed for any given ISO might not be fast enough. That’s because prior to the D3, ISO above 800 was rarely good enough for me to be happy with the 17 inch by 22 inch prints I’d make on my Epson 3800. Continue Reading