Holy cow! What a fun, fast encounter this was! I was leaving the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge on Sunday and happened across this cool young raptor perched on one of the entrance signs. It had its back to me and I got a few okay poses.
Realizing it wasn’t likely to hang out long, I kept my camera trained on it. Surprisingly, in one, fast movement, it pivoted around and launched right toward me. I captured the entire sequence from start to finish, getting some way cool shots, this one being my favorite.
I have to say, that the pre-shooting feature on my new Canon EOS R5 Mark II is what made this possible. This feature effectively starts caching a half-second of images when the camera trigger is pressed halfway. Then, when you squeeze the trigger fully, it saves that previous half second of images up to when you squeezed and keeps going if you do.
In this case, it would be pretty much impossible to press the trigger fast enough to capture the entire launch – and I didn’t need to. This is an amazing feature and should go a long way toward preventing missing the shot because I was too slow with the trigger.
