I have had the lens for 15 plus years and it has taken a lot of good bird photos primarily. It is HEAVY at about 13 pounds with the lens hood and then you add the camera body. I bought a Gitzo system 5 tripod and presently am using a Kirk gimble head, the new, not the King Cobra which I used earlier but prefer to not side mount because of the weight. It worked well for years and I have been satisfied with the pictures I obtained. I did tend to keep the shutter speed up and with the inertia of the combination I had little problems with blurred pics if I did my part. This is the original 300-800, not the latter digital version which had some new lens coatings but as I remember the same lens formula. I quickly found a picture taken in the last couple years to show that it does have decent feather detail. It was taken with 1/50 sec shutter speed.
I use it rarely now because of some more modern lenses in the 600 mm range but it is a good lens from a blind with good support. It will be used again for birds but little else. It can be obtained much cheaper than a 600/4.0 prime.

Being somewhat compulsive and afraid of losing files I have 4 four tb external drives with all my digital photographic files on each.. Presently I have WD and Seagate and have had no problems with either brand. In the past I had a Lacie fail and have increased to four copies, as the drives are now relatively inexpensive.

you can download the free dng converter from adobe and convert your a6300 files to dng and then can process the raw files in camera raw in CS4

It is outside the park but Soco falls is between Cherokee NC and the Maggie valley and is a beautiful falls. As one goes north it is on the right and is just off the highway. There is parking on the road and it is a short walk to an overlook, but the best shots are from the side where you have to go on to some rocks. I suggest crawling on to these to take your photos as I fell there several years ago but only to where I was standing and not down the side of a small cliff which could be very dangerous. Have fun and there are quite a number of great photo opportunities. Best time is in the fall with change in leaves but can be quite crowded

It is a good shot of a female red wing blackbird. A juvenile male would look about the same but I doubt any juvenile males this time of year

After i read this thread , the bird is not a female or juvenile red wing blackbird as they are brown with stripes. In looking at National Geographic Birds of North America that is the winter plumage of the rusty male blackbird. They winter from the gulf into the northern continental USA in the eastern half of the nation and nest in northern to southern Canada and the New England states. The rusty end of the feathers wear off and summer plumage is then black.

The Ben Wilmore Photoshop course is 20(20 lessons) hours long and I recently purchased it from the Great Courses for I believe around $70 downloaded and can be kept in your courses with The Great Courses and opened and watched as needed and I believe can also be downloaded to your own hard drive. I have been using Photoshop for 20+ years and am learning many new things about the program. It is easily worth what I paid and also the $129 mentioned earlier in this thread would be a bargain also.

If running any Windows program less than Win 10, the latest version of Photoshop will not work and cannot be updated. I have a desktop running Windows 8 that has to use the 2018 version of Photoshop and a laptop with Win 10 that runs the latest version of Photoshop. In addition there is a new PS update that requires the latest version of the Win update to run and that is the antialiasing update to sharpen some raw files. I am not sure about what happens in a Mac without the latest updates however. For Windows users at present you need the latest version for the latest update. This may answer your question.