Excellent shots!
Interested to know what settings you are using for BIF - I have struggled with this on the V1 with my 300mm PF lens.
Thanks. - A major reason why I bought the V2/1Nikkor 70-300 and a source of inspiration has been
Thomas Stirr's website. This professional photographer is using his V2 bodies mainly for video in his daily work, but for fun he uses and loves the Nikon 1 system. One of his latest posts has been about
Swallows in Flight, have a look at the 15 consecutive photos at the end, an impressive AF-C run! Thomas Stirr mentions his settings with the swallows:
I captured all of the images in this article hand-held with a Nikon 1 V2 and a 1 Nikon CX 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 zoom lens. I used matrix metering, Manual settings with Auto-ISO 160-3200, AF-C at 15fps with subject tracking.
My own settings are the same, only instead of matrix metering I used center weighed. Maybe something I have to change (I strictly used center weighed with my Canon SX50 for years). I also chose 1/2500 sec.
By the way, among the 28 articles about BIF with 1Nikkor 70-300 on
Thomas Stirr's site there is a piece titled
Blackbird Chasing a Hawk - impressive shots (in particular the youtube link at the end), although the hawk actually may be a buzzard. For the sake of comparison, here is one photo that I had published in this forum, of
a crow chasing a buzzard. I had been quite proud of my string of ten photos, all ten showing the buzzard and most of them the crow, which I took as a "burst" with the SX50. Stirr's 25 consecutive shots were so much better!
It is interesting to note that my "burst" with the SX50 had the flying objects in a 90 degree angle to me - a situation which offers the best chance for a BIF with the SX50 and probably many other cameras. In contrast, I find that the V2/1Nikkor 70-300 with its hybrid focus system does best in situations where the bird comes into the photographer's direction. This was exactly how the blackbird series began, btw, until the birds took a turn.
To take a series of 15 or 25 consecutive shots, as Thomas Stirr does here, is not an exception. I have had series of 45 consecutive shots of a swallow. The difference is that Stirr shoots RAW photos (and edits all of his photos with DxO Optics pro 10 and other top-notch software), and I presently shoot only JPEG large, so that it takes a little longer for me until the buffer is full. I've found that the buffer takes 55 or 56 photos shot in JPEG large. - I am not so sure, by the way, whether it is an advantage for BIF to own the Nikon V3 instead of the V2 - I understand that the V3 has 20 fps (vs 15 fps), but doesn't this mean only 3 seconds of action instead of 4?
Postscript. After taking tons of photos with the Canon SX50 I still love this camera. Superzooms like the SX50, SX60 or the Nikon P900 offer much value for our money. But sometimes you are eager to try out something new, and I find the somewhat different Nikon colours refreshing - sample photos below.