Machine gunning captured animals

Was at the zoo yesterday watching a Spectacled bear, the animal was sitting in some water about 20 feet away, very still and peaceful. A Canon user with a big telephoto came up and started shooting, must have taken at least a hundred shots in 5 minutes, nearly woke the bear up.
Perhaps I was just jealous.

Davex.

If the bear was dozing, just one shot would have done it....but that is less spectacular.

Nah you should just make one photo and leave saying you earned 200 bucks again today

I did get a good shot, took a total of 5, but then went and formatted the card before I backed up the images . To be honest am to lazy to recover the file. The bear, and me will be back again.

Davex.

I have seen something similar - a chap with a Nikon D2 I think (big pro looking camera but a bit older so with a smaller MP sensor) - was just holding down the shutter on auto and generally pointing it at the holes in the wire fence to get a shot of a tiger... most of the time wasn't even looking through the viewfinder. Presumably he ended up with hundreds of shots but having searched through them got one he was happy with... or perhaps he was making a flicker book... It's a technique I guess, although I prefer the more minimalist approach myself.

Regards

Lazy way of getting a good shot if you ask me. Anyone can machine gun and get one good shot. Photography is as much about the creative side and planning of the shot, it sounds like the pros approach to machine gun, doesn't take much skill IMHO

Why would a machine gun approach make a good shot? If that were true then I would certainly do it. Does the machine gun mode carefully compose the shot for you?

Mike

The "machine gun approach" is only guaranteed to produce a large number of images. Every single one of them could miss the moment.

Concentration, dedication, practice and timing will have a higher success rate IMHO. However, it takes a lot of effort to achieve.

A canon user I know took 3000 shots at an air display recently, he's only really happy with 30 or so. Damn good they are too but....

He admits that he shoots too many frames but...

Oh, and he's never used film, why doesn't that surprise me?

I tried continuous mode for the first time recently (photographing my brother and his friends karting). I wasn't terribly impressed as despite using a monopod the resulting images were nothing like as good as the ones I took in single shot by carefully lining up and waiting for the right moment to shoot. I can only assume that the AF with my 100-300mm zoom simply wasn't fast enough to keep up!

Think of all the iconic photos of the racing greats. I doubt the photographers even had a motor winder for most of them, yet they still managed to capture the atmosphere perfectly. If they could do that with subjects flying past at 150mph+ then why on earth would anyone want to blaze away in full auto continuous mode at a zoo animal that isn't even moving?

Allowing 5 seconds to open, view, discard that`s 4hours, just to check the images. Obviously has to much time on his hands.

Davex.

I notice that I sometimes hold the shutter to make 2 or 3 shots in a row, certainly with portrait I'm always so unlucky that he or she just blinks when I press the shutter.

I once made 800 photos on a day and that was with a endurance race that start earlier in the midday and ended at night.
No machine gunning though since I panned almost all my shots.