It's amazing how fast snakes can swim. This is a western diamondback rattlesnake swimming through the artificial pond we used to photograph the bats. It crossed the 6-foot wide pond in about 2 seconds. I've cropped this significantly -- I wasn't nearly as close as this picture implies -- but I thought it was intriguing to see how the snake plowed its way through the water. To freeze the shape of the water and guarantee a tack sharp image, I used my standard settings for birds in flight -- 1/3200, f/11, and the ISO was on auto. Because of the bright early morning sunlight, the ISO turned out to be 1250. I used 560mm of focal length -- a 100-400mm set to 400 along with a 1.4x teleconverter. I chose the 14 fps frame rate so I wouldn't miss any nuance of the motion.
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