The Epic Pounce

I took this photo after the second major snow storm we had in NJ this winter. The snow was about 2.5 ft deep, and Zoe was itching to play in the snow. I decided I wanted to get a nice fast motion shot of her jumping in the deep snow, so I clipped on my 85mm and headed out. Initially it was really hard for her to walk around in snow that deep, seeing as she is about 2ft tall! Once she got used to it she got the hang of prancing around and jumping like a deer.

To get this particular shot I chose my frame, made sure I was at least at f8, this way I knew that at 85mm I had roughly a 2 foot depth of field, enough to keep the majority of Zoe in focus and she was running towards me. I set up at about 1/1600th of a second, plenty fast enough to freeze her motion as she was running toward the camera. The basic set up was I had someone stand behind me as I crouched down, and throw a snowball far in front of where I was shooting, once Zoe was out there and realized there was no snowball to bring back, we called her name frantically to come back to us. On her way back I had my helper throw another snowball right in front of the camera, and as she bolted toward me I just snapped away at 4.5fps hoping I would get something good.

I did this setup in many different configurations and kept shooting for about 20min. I got a lot of great pictures but out of the 250+ I shot this was the best.

This is not the final finished photo, I did some light processing in Lightroom, but I think I am going to go back and crop it a little more to heighten the tension. All in all I think it came out really nice, and it's definitely a very unique action packed moment.

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