The first shot, a Gold-Crowned male sparrow, was taken on April 15. I believe I used my old standard settings of aperture priority in jpeg format on the camera. A bit of editing was done in Elements 13.

The other shots include Gold-Crowned Sparrows and a couple of HBs shot this morning in manual mode RAW. The editing process was almost the same with a few additional tweaks. I must credit mrjcall (Jim) with the push to move in this direction as I try to get better quality images. Any success I've had is due to his valued constructive critiques. Any failures are my own. I must say, I've really enjoyed the move in the direction of trying to get more control of the process. There's still so much to learn, it's a bit daunting.

Feel free to offer suggestions as I continue to learn from all critiques. Thanks, Vicki

I decided to try just sitting still in a lawn chair in a shadow and see how close birds would get. Since a lot of this years fledglings now associate me with food and water. So I just sat in the chair under the shadow of the pool slide. 6 feet from the birdbath and its potted "jungle" and around 15 feet from the swing set/play fort with the feeders hanging from it. One of the young male finches played around the bird bath for a couple of minutes but when I thought about raising the camera to snap pictures he took off and landed on the far side of a feeder, for 10 minutes I got glimpses of seeds, shells etc with a bit of his tail. Meanwhile this young squirrel and some doves were feeding on the ground from his sloppy left overs. (dogs were napping in the family room with oldies playing)
#1 7DII, 100-400 @ 400, 1/500 @ f/7.1, ISO 1600 back light from afternoon sun, hand held
#2 same but he moved a foot into better light so ISO 640

This series is from recent attempts to catch some of the many (15+) we have coming to enjoy our feeders. Most of our visitors are "Anna's," but we're seeing some "Rufous" in the mix which will only be here a short time as they migrate north. I've shot them inflight stopping the wing action as well as showing the blur and have decided the blurred version is more accurate to what we actually see.

The perched Rufous is a little soft. He was shot late in the day when the light was poor, and I couldn't get him any sharper. I debated posting that shot but thought you'd like to see the difference between the two varieties.