Another unsharp shot as best shot in February. I always rate expression over sharpness and technical perfection. Like in January I took over 1000 images in February but I took this one for my picture of the month. Why? I took a great flight shot of a greylag goose with the 300 + TC20. My best mountains in sunset shot in Ramsau, great images of tits ( the birds ! ), my best squirrel shots so far and a perfect panning shot of a car.

But here is my POM-dilemma: My last 3 POMs were birdshots and with March and April to come it is very likely that I will have thousands of birdshots to choose for the picture of the month. Mountain sunset: I took an image of these mountains from exactly the same spot though in less attractive light. Squirrel: done it before though a mediocre image compared to the new ones. And for the car panning: it was a BMW and I drive Volvo.

There are months were I kind hardly find one shot to be good enough to be posted here and there are months were I got over a dozen of great images. Though it´s hard to select that special image I prefer the situation were I have a lot of images to choose from.

But I have no highspeed sportshot in my POM-portfolio so far. I really pushed my D1 to the limits. 800ASA isn´t the best idea ( here the D1 clearly shows it´s age ) but AF was fast enough to keep up with the action. Even in better light the 1/90s would be my favourite choice of shutterspeed because it keeps mainparts of the image sharp but still allows enough blurr to show the speed. I shot nearly 2GB of images and this one I liked best. The image is uncropped and unchanged I just adjusted WB in Capture but I resisted to make the snow white because I think that a slightly yellow cast is more realistic under these conditions.

settings: M-Mode, 240mm ( equ. ), 1/90s@f4 and 800ASA, WB: cloudy-3 finetuned in Capture