As a wildlife photographer and educator I have the privileged opportunity to give workshops in numerous national parks of India. At the Satpura National Park in Madhya Pradesh I witnessed this kind of behaviour from the Sambar Deer for the first time. It was playing by itself in the muddy water. It sunk its face in the mud, got up, ran around in the water and suddenly jumped.

Once I saw this behaviour, I instinctively knew it would do it again and quickly had my camera settings ready to capture the action when it did. Since it was already 5pm and the light was a bit low and I was shooting with the 400mm f2.8 lens -I increased the ISO to 800 and set the aperture to 2.8 and used an exposure compensation of -1 to get that faster shutter speed.

I was in “AI servo mode” since it was moving around and used the cluster of focusing points ( a feature available in 7D, 5DM3 and 1DX + new cameras coming out from Canon).

When it did jump again, I was prepared to capture the action. Of course, all this happened in less than 5 seconds. Wildlife photography can certainly keep you on your toes!

Canon 1DX + Canon 400mm f2.8 L IS II, ISO 800, f2.8 @ 1/1000, Evaluative Metering -1 Stop, Aperture Priority, WB 5650K.