The first decision you have to make when shooting wildlife is the shutter speed. Aperture is a distant second decision. It doesn't matter how much depth of field you have if the subject is blurred due to movement because your shutter was too slow. Therefore, you choose a speed fast enough to freeze movement. With these lynx kittens I photographed today in my babies workshop in Minnesota, I used 640 ISO and that kept my shutter speed fast. In the early morning sunlight, I was shooting with 1/1250th of a second. When the kittens went into the shade, that changed, but the speed was still fast enough to render the very playful subjects with tack sharp clarity. I used Program mode here, and that gave me an f/stop of f/11 in the sunlight. Program is biased to giving you virtually the fastest shutter possible given the light and the ISO you selected. It doesn't take away your creativity -- you don't leave your brain at home with you use this mode. You watch the settings it's giving you, and if you don't like them, then you can switch to shutter or aperture priority.
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