I used a fast 1/640th of a second shutter speed to stop the action here, freezing the hands of both mother and child as they share high fives at a Cuenca bus stop. I had photographed this woman and her child for about five minutes with a telephoto lens from across the street, capturing many different moods and relationships. This moment was my favorite – it speaks of spontaneity, pride, and love.

I was photographing a family of tourists incongruously enjoying a day at the beach on what once was one of the most brutal prison colonies on earth. As this woman was pointing to something of interest, she never saw the young man throw himself into the sea just behind her. I caught his leap as he brushed past the pointing woman, arms held high, and a squeal of delight on his lips. The compression effect of my long 400mm telephoto focal length appears to have the child leaping on the back of the woman, and my shutter stops his flight only inches away from her. In reality, he missed her by several feet. She never turned her head.

Capturing a raptor in flight requires skill, the right equipment, and a bit of luck. I can’t use a heavy top of the line camera body because of weight issues, so I always must sacrifice a bit of focusing and burst shooting speed. In other words, I must always deal with some shutter lag, which can be a problem when it comes to stopping fast action. My lightweight camera, however, can stop key action moments if I am able to anticipate the moment, and begin shooting an instant before the moment I am trying to freeze. In this case, I began setting the focus and exposure on this hawk by pressing my shutter button half way down while it was still in its nest. After the focus and exposure was set, I pressed the shutter button all the way down to shoot, but this hawk was already leaving the nest. By the time my camera was able to record its first image, the bird was already in flight. I had my camera set on “burst” mode, and used a very fast shutter speed of 1/1600th of a second. The first image of burst was an awkward composition, with the bird and tree branches merging into a confusing mess. This image was the second shot in my multiple image burst – and it produced exactly what I wanted to capture. I was able to suspend the hawk in flight, frozen in time with wings upright, just inches from the outstretched branches of the tree, yet with part of the nest still in the frame.

Warm evening light, an exotic mosque, and a row of Turkish flags make a picturesque travel shot. Making it even more expressive is the passage of three pigeons who space themselves out perfectly beneath the flags and between the roost on the roof at left and the pair of minarets. It is moment in time and space frozen at precisely the right instant. Some might call such spacing a matter of luck. But as photographers we can increase our chances by shooting a lot of frames and hoping for the best. I fired off a burst of three or four shots every time pigeons passed through my frame, and out of fifty or sixty tries, this was the shot that worked the best for me.

I thought I was finished shooting for the day, and was trudging back to my hotel, when I heard the roar of a skateboard in the distance. I followed the sound, and discovered a young man using a sidewalk leading to a warehouse loading dock as a skateboard run. The warehouse itself offered a clean, unifying background, and the canopy over the loading dock provides a strong diagonal shadow as a counter point to the diagonal thrust of the steps below it. All I needed to complete the image was this final diagonal – formed here by the raised arm of the skateboarder as he floats through the air over the jagged diagonal of the steps. I have seized a moment in time here that stops movement, creates geometric coherence, and offers crackling tension in the negative space between the skateboard and the steps.

Thousands of gulls soar over the old fishing port, searching, no doubt, for a free lunch. There is no way to know exactly what kind of motions we can stop or blur in a situation like this. There are a dozen gulls in the air and fifteen others jammed on a railing below them – and no way to anticipate what comes next. I set my shutter speed on 1/400th of a second, zoomed out my lens to 230mm, and used burst shooting to fire off three separate bursts of four or five shots, each with a single press of the shutter button. This was the only image out of 15 or so where there were no gull mergers in the sky. Each gull was distinct from the others, and flying in its own space. The two gulls in profile at the center of the image are the best examples of stopped action here. In fact, the gull at top center is actually carrying a morsel with its feet.