There are no shortage of superb wildlife photographers or great images. To set your wildlife photography apart from all the rest, consider a specialty or focused theme. In addition to my regular wildlife photographs I strive to catch “feeding” shot of birds. The feeding shot is much tougher to achieve and takes a ton of patience. I’ve watched great blue herons go for 30 minutes or more without catching a fish. What I have learned to do, is watch the behaviors that telegraph an impending lightning-fast strike. With herons it tends to be them lowering their head slightly and then freezing all motion. For such shots you need a high shutter speed such as 1/1000 second or higher and shot in the cluster mode to get maximum frames per second. Once the heron spears the fish, you have two to four seconds to capture the shot before the bird swallows the fish. I especially like this image as per the eyes of the speared fish. Not only are the eyes of the heron important, but sometimes the eyes or expression of the prey as well. As a side note, after watching and photographing numerous herons do this, I learned that a heron spears a fish with its beak, it does not catch the fish between the upper and lower bill. But, once speared, the heron will flick the speared fish and then grab it between the upper and lower bill before swallowing it.
