Birds of pray

I have never tried to take photo's of birds before, but took the kids out for the day and thought i would take the camera.
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Can't wait to go back and visit again.

should add i know pelicans aren't birds of prey, but they were so comical!

Some nice shots there Liubice, my faves are 3 4 7 9 10

In 8 I'd be tempted to edit out the smaller pole.

Firstly great to see some posts! I for one encourage and greatly appreciate more people posting on this forum so we get a more diverse range of pictures and opinions, so thanks for that. You have asked for C&C which is good, it might be an idea to set the flags (settings) in your control panel to say 'yes' to C&C and then choose also yes or no to allow people to edit your pictures. I don't like mine being edited unless i have asked for it, other people don't mind.

The thing i liked about the pictures is generally I thought they were well composed. I'm not sure if this is all in camera or from cropping in editing. But I thought the framing and general principles were all there, even the panning in 10. Where would I improve? Well the birds are a difficult subject to get right, dark birds flying against brighter sky, flying against 'camoflage' background, background objects getting in the way, (fast) moving flapping birds trying to focus... Quite a number of pictures look soft lacking sharpness through movement or focus, some could be improved by post processing...'lifting' the birds by adjusting colour, contrast, brightness, selectively to bring out the birds colour. I haven't seen the technical details on the pictures (the exif data) but I suspect if you went again you could push up the ISO a little or choose a faster shutter speed. You may also be able to set your camera so it doesn't fire until focus locks (Olympus? you can do this on my Nikon). You have exactly the right principle with the shallow depth of field to blur unwanted background. You could blur it more to remove unwanted distractions (e.g. the bench 6) in PP.

Hope that helps a bit.

really useful feedback there BC

I do try you know... Some people just think I am very trying...

Great photos, Love the last two

Just had a look again, are these cropped down from much bigger images or are they pretty much as they were taken? I am just wondering if the softness is coming because the images are cropped and enlarged?

I like 10 the best.

some are lightly cropped, but not by much, i will admit to having the ISO on auto having the kids with me and trying to keep an eye on them, and with birds flying too close to my head so i was trying hard not to duck. I know i need to teach myself alot more on what the camera can do, and learn how to set it up to take photo's rather that relying on the presets.