Not nearly as graceful but what I find as a huge challenge is photographing a running Black-tailed Prairie Dog. They don’t tend to run that much but when they do, they kind of look like a pot bellied Tony the Pony on the gallop. The tail goes one way, the belly another and the head another. There is no grace to it. This makes getting a “cool” shot a challenge. This, along with their slow speed, you need a cloudy day like we had to get a slow shutter speed to help the blur of the pan to show any motion. I was at 1/100 f/6.7 panning with who we nicknames Waldo as he was being very goofy. I ended up shooting about 4GB of video of Waldo with his antics. While the eye is sharp, because of their funny run, the rest of the body is way out of focus. I shot about 40 clicks on this to get the one with a sharp eye. Pretty short odds but I’m glad I have the one.
Photo captured by D3x, 600VR w/TC-17e on Lexar UDMA digital film