Pa, like you I continue to be amazed by the relatively high percentage of keepers I can get with the D7000 and 70-300 VR compared to my old D90 shooting things like birds in flight. Mostly I credit the D7000's fantastic new AF system and remarkable high-ISO performance. Two examples, if I may (I certainly don't mean to hijack the thread, just reinforce your original point). These were taken minutes apart in the late afternoon when the light was rather dim -- and warm, which I like and wait for (the "golden hour").
270mm, shutter priority 1/1600 @ f/10, ISO 1000, dynamic area 21-point AF-C, severe cropping, very minor levels adjustments and sharpening.
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Happy to have you post pictures in this thread, Bob. These are both excellent, but I especially like the second one. Having the duck catching some sun against the dark background makes it stand out wonderfully.
I haven't tried any BIFs yet, but your results encourage me to do so.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very impressed with the D7000, but even in the shade, f5 and 1/2500 is pretty bright conditions so you'd expect ISO 2200 to look good.
Here's ISO 2000 with no NR at f4, 1/200, just after sun had set behind the trees on the horizon.
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EDIT: Apologies for taking thread away from OP, although I guess sharing our experiences of this lovely little camera is all good!
Very impressive with exceptional detail (that 200-400 is a terrific lens). BTW, what kind of bird is that?
Regarding my shot of the mallard coming in for a landing, what pleasantly surprised me was how well it held up overall at ISO 2200 with the moderate cropping (about 30%), but especially how little noise there was in the OOF, underexposed background foliage. Actually, it looked very clean before I ran it through Neat Image (using minimal NR), but I just wanted to smooth it out a tiny bit. With my D90 the noise/grain in the background foliage would look like golf balls.
Happy to have you post pictures in this thread, Bob. These are both excellent, but I especially like the second one. Having the duck catching some sun against the dark background makes it stand out wonderfully.
I haven't tried any BIFs yet, but your results encourage me to do so.
Thanks, Jim. The new 39-point AF system in the D7000 really does make shooting BIFs easy coming from the very limited 11 AF points available with my former D90 and D80. With those cameras, BIF shots were an exercise in frustration where keepers were few and far between.
By all means give it a try when you have a chance, it's a ton of fun, and the 70-300 VR is a great lens for it. I'd suggest starting out with the setting I use -- dynamic area 21-point AF-C and shutter priority. Then you can play around with the shutter speed to get the desired effect.
Even though it was flapping its wings frantically and flying pretty fast, 1/2500 froze the mallard in midair in the shot I posted above. In this next shot I wanted to get some wing motion, so I used 1/1000 sec.
D7000, 70-300 VR, 100mm, shutter priority 1/1000 @ f/5, ISO 800, moderate cropping and minimal sharpening only.
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Do I "cheat" to get these BIFs? You bet I do if you call taking short 3-5 frame bursts using 6 fps continuous mode cheating! Personally, I call it "insurance," not "cheating." :biggrin:
Also, you can crank out a lot of frames in a short time trying to follow flying birds. I inevitably wind up with a lot of partial birds (and a fair number of great photos of the sky) in the process. So you may want to think about shooting JPEG Large Fine instead of RAW for the smaller file sizes and faster continuous shooting.
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