Patience, they will come back time and again and wait for just the right light or event. And many times not to panic waiting it out to get the picture no matter how scary the risk. I do not know if the story is true, but: " For a series of fotos of elephants a NG photographer had a foxhole dug near a watering hole which was daily visited by a herd. The foxhole had a sturdy cover of bars allowing him to pop up and snap a series of frames. So in he goes before dawn, patiently waiting for the herd to come down. However, he once did a series of “out west” fotos and remembered that when the cattle came to their watering hole they relieved themselves. Now it was a small foxhole & he began to wonder if his fate would be to drown if elephants also did the same, filling his foxhole?”

Believe that about the D5 if you wish, but DXO, ImageResource, DPReview, and hosts of others score the A9 better than the D5 for low light dynamic range. I have used the best from Nikon, including the D5 and the Canon EOS 1DX (I had extensively used them both in my career) and I left them both and moved to the Sony A9 and would never go back. Unless you shot the same photo under the same conditions you have no idea what you are talking about to say the D5 would have done better. Prove it . I don't really care if the image impresses you. I shot it for me and BTW it is getting published in a Caribbean Travel magazine. Cheers

I have the fortunate opportunity to frequently go on photo trips with Nat Geo photographers and know several of them pretty well, although none of the ones readers of the magazine recognize as the superstars. There has been a lot of incorrect info in this stream. Nat Geo goes have strict editorial guidelines which could be summed up as not allowing any more than the basic "editing" capabilities as were possible back in the film days. The equipment that they shoot with is pretty much the same as the more serious who I read regularly on this site. I was surprised to see on a trip last month that three of them were using mirrorless-each a different brand. Two of them were just trying them out. And they were getting great pictures. They do get equipment support from the manufacturer of equipment they use, but normally this amounts to use of new cameras or lenses--which they can purchase at a discount after the shoot.

What they do better than us which leads to so many excellent shots is practice. I have heard one say that he will be playing with the controls on his camera every day when he is relaxing over tv, etc, so that he will be very familiar with every control on his camera when he is shooting--not having to think about how to adjust something, but just doing it. They all say they shoot daily, even if they don't have an assignment. For the most part they use our equipment and glass and get better results because they do this for a living and they have a great eye for what they want to get in a picture. I have been challenged by these people as I try to get pictures they might be proud of. My first such shot occurred in the Arctic shooting a polar bear on sea ice. She was jumping from one ice flow to another and I caught it perfectly--all four feet off of the ice, sharp, great light, etc. (the picture is on the dust cover of my book of the trip). One of the Nat Geo people has become a good friend and he was taking pictures of the same activity. He told me that none of his got the scene like mine--the proudest photo experience in my life! By the way, that hasn't happened since then.