As a follow up to my article Geese In Flight at 30 FPS, this new posting shares a collection of 9 images of a goose taking off from water at 30 fps. All images were captured hand-held with a Nikon 1 V3 and a 1 Nikkor CX 70-300 mm f/4.5-5.6 zoom lens. When shooting at 30 frames per second with Nikon 1 gear, the first frame locks exposure and auto-focus for the balance of an image run. All photographs in this article were captured at 138 mm (efov 372.6 mm), f/5.6, 1/1600, ISO-250.

The goose in these photographs was one of a pair that were milling about on the surface of some water proximate to a cement pier. After the first goose took off and landed up on the pier, I knew it would only be a few seconds before the second one would join it.

I had already decided that I would be shooting at 30 frames per second for my entire outing that day. I acquired focus on the remaining goose and waited for it to take off. In less than a minute it did just that. What follows are the 9 best captures from a run of 40 photographs. The last 11 images in the run proved unusable as the goose was partially obscured by the cement pier.

As you can see from the 9 images above, using a frame rate of 30 fps did yield a reasonable selection of usable images. As noted earlier in this article, I had already decided that I would shoot at 30 frames per second for my entire outing, regardless of the photographic opportunity.

In the case of this goose taking off from water at 30 fps…  this was a purposeful mistake on my part.

Given that I had a clear shooting angle of the goose on the surface of the water, I would not have typically used 30 frames per second for this specific situation.

A much more effective frame rate would have been 60 frames per second as I would have captured twice as many images as the goose took off. This would have dramatically increased my chances of capturing some unique wing positions and water spray.

As it turned out, I ended up with too many repetitive wing positions. In addition, the last 11 images of my run were basically useless because of the obstruction caused by the pier.

When selecting a frame rate at which to shoot, it is important to consider the critical part of an action sequence, the flight direction of the bird, and potential obstructions.

Technical Note:
All images were captured hand-held using camera gear as per the EXIF data noted in the article. All images in this article were produced from RAW files using my standard process of DxO PhotoLab, CS6 and the Nik Collection.

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