When photographing action, it's essential to use a fast shutter speed. Even if the light is low, you have to deal with the noise later (with noise reducing software). The picture is worthless if it's blurred, so there is really no choice. Forego depth of field, too. The emphasis has to be on the shutter. I photographed this Kazakh eagle hunter just as the golden eagle was landing on his arm, and even though these huge birds don't flap their wings at a super fast rate, I still used 1/1000th of a second. For action, this speed is the minimum. A lot of photographers enjoy blurring moving subjects, and I do that, too, but there is a lot to be said for freezing every hair and every feather in a shot like this. I used a 300mm f/2.8 telephoto for this picture, and the camera was set to aperture priority at f/2.8. This gave me the faster shutter speed possible given how much light was available.
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