African wild dog

African wild dogs are among the most endangered mammals in Africa, and that's one reason it's so hard to photograph them. Yesterday here in Sabi Sabi in South Africa, my photo tour group and I came across a pack of the dogs as they were hunting for impala. In a private reserve, there are no restrictions about staying on the roads. Therefore, we were able to follow the pack anywhere they went. At warp speed, we drove over trees, logs, and rocks to keep up with the fast moving predators. Every once in a while, for a brief moment, one of the wild dogs would stop to assess his situation, and that afforded us a great opportunity for a beautiful shot. My settings for this were 1/1000, f/5.6, 1600 ISO, and I used a Canon 500mm f/4 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 700mm of focal length on a full frame camera (the 1Dx Mark II). Note that the shutter speed was faster, in fractions of a second, than the focal length of the lens in millimeters. This insured a sharp picture.