Chase

Last weekend was quite spectacular. We had snow on the ground and a bright blue sky - after months of overcast skies, this was something special.
The wolves were very lazy though, and I watched them sleep for 5 hours straight.
One thing about persistence is that it's usually rewarded - and I got plenty of rewards This was both the most boring and one of the most exciting photo shoots I had in a long time.
The wolves were only active for about 30-45 minutes, but it was totally worth the wait.

Here's one of the higher-ranking wolves (not the alpha) of the pack at Tierpark Sababurg suddenly going for a serious chase after the omega, who was resting not far from me at the fence.
That day, I decided to shoot mostly with the 1.4x teleconverter on - an unfortunate setup in this case. I noticed a trampling noise to the right, looked, and saw that wolf running straight in my direction. I have another photo of that series that I am going to upload tomorrow that looks a bit less spectacular, where he's looking right into the camera while running at high-speed. After that, the locked back on his main target and I just shoot away. This was probably the first time I could really benefit from the 12fps of the 1D X as you can see

Although at 560mm, I managed to get 10 shots of the running sequence, two or three of which are quite usable. The rest has cut-off ears, tails, paws or all of it But they still make awesome reference photos...
On a side note, the 400mm f/2.8 II is so great that the 1.4x III TC does not degrade image quality AT ALL. There is no visible difference between photos taken with or without it. It's pretty remarkable.
Also, it's quite interesting that I have serious problems with the inaccurate / jumping auto focus of the 1D X when using the 400mm f/2.8 II. Using the 1.4x TC improved accuracy of the autofocus remarkably... really odd!
I talked to Monty Sloan about it and he currently has the same problem. The AF continuously got worse and worse, and Monty thinks it's the firmware upgrades that fixed the f/8 autofocus "issue". Good point... in any case, it's highly annoying!

By the way... the omega managed to escape in time

Hope you enjoy this photo as much as I do!


EXIF data:
Camera: Canon EOS-1D X
Lens: Canon EF400mm f/2.8L IS II USM + Canon 1.4x III TC
Focal Length: 560 mm
Exposure: 1/1250 sec; f/5,0; ISO 200