Mr Brandt's advice is right on. I ski and photograph at Loveland Ski area. I've learned a lot from their photographer, Dustin Schaefer. Set your exposure compensation to overexpose 1 to 1.5 stops. Check your histogram. The same rules apply for sand dunes. The lightness of the subject matters. The ambient light will vary widely because it's seldom always sunny. Cloudy and blowing are often the conditions. Compose your pictures to have sufficient contrast and form using trees, mountain ridges, clouds, clumps of skiers. flares and shadows. In Photoshop, you can take the blue out of your pictures easiest if you shoot in raw and open that file to adjust the light temperature. I also pull down the highlights and boost the clarity when it's effective. Life is much more fun since the end of "film".

Take a tripod along when you shoot with long lenses. The extra weight is worth the effort considering how much your long lenses already weigh. You have meta-data recorded on your shot which you did not disclose. You'll see this in the picture's properties file. So the bird is sedentary...you have the time. The weather was overcast and windy. Probably you're shooting f 4.5 wide open at 1/800 second with the grainy ISO rating of 1600. With a tripod, you could shoot at f 8.0 with ISO 400 at 1/60 second. If you ever shoot from your car (or in my case, often from a motorcycle), shut off the motor; lose the vibration (as well as the urgency to rush on to the next view) and take numerous shots. If I'm making "grab shots", I use sports mode AF with two or three shots in succession. It increases the likelihood that one is sharpest and no eyes are closed in a blink.