Until that time, do still practice on them higher up - with a 600mm lens you should get something, and the practice will get you ready for the good days. In particular:

• Tracking
• Best times in any circle to take the shot (sun, and facing)
• Behaviours to watch for - patrolling or soaring on thermals, or breaking into straight flight, so you know where they’ll be
• Address dark bird on bright sky issues (post-processing RAWs luminance curve, or exposure compensation) - you’ll notice my sky is a blown out white - it wasn’t on the day :)
• Camera settings that work for you

And practice panning with pigeons, crows or anything else in view

Yes, done at 800mm. However, there’s other reasons it’s reasonably sharp, some technical, some to do with Kites.

Technically, that’s cropped down a bit , taken in good light at a good angle from the sun (so 1/1250, ISO250 and that worked, other than messing with the luminance curve), and the bird was indeed slowing down to land - earlier in its flight the photos were a little softer.

But the crucial difference is that Red Kites are urban birds - though they apparently do hunt, they are seen as scavengers and carrion eaters. As such, they are much less fussed by humans than most birds of prey, and while they don’t interract with humans in Prospect Park itself, there are some who feed them, and there are tales of picnic thefts, conversely there’s no persecution of them in towns (it would be illegal, and unpopular). So a lazy speed at not much higher than head height perhaps as close as 30 yards is not that uncommon. It’s also more uncommon for me not to see a Kite somewhere on my walk than not (if usually because its soaring high up so very visible): I feel so happy about their successful reintroduction.

Which of course, given they are good looking birds, make them a joy to photo.

Oh, and an example of why 1/500s is too slow, if you look carefully it’s a bit soft

Canon’s DPP4 starts displaying RAW files from Canon Camera’s processed as if by the Canon camera, as a feature, for precisely that reason: a good starting point.

Even if it didn’t, the “ideal” recipe for displaying a RAW file as a JPG is probably relatively straightforward (how to form the luminance histograms, level of noise reduction & sharpening, etc.) and likely to give what appears to be the same results. I’d expect you’d only usually spot this with extreme pixel peeping. If the process was not straightforward, it would slow displaying the JPG in camera, and thus slow down the whole photography experience, so that’s not going to happen!

As an alternative to buying your own printer, if you can cope with the delay, there’s many firms out there that will do really nice prints from digital photos at surprisingly low costs, delivered pretty fast.

Give how much I’ve wasted on unused colours of ink and printers just breaking entirely, that is how I now do the few photos I want hard copies of.

In passing, if taking shots to record precise colours (you mention glazes), I hope you’ve worked out you want some known colour reference cards or the like in every shot - nothing, whether digital or film, is going to give you accurate colours or luminance without post-processing.

Drat!

Fun photo and to me a really satisfying composition of elements!

Gadwalls are apparently both resident and winter visitors in various places in the UK (he says, repeating back a book).

Parakeets are recent-ish (1950’s or later) escapees/releases who have managed to start breeding in the UK - London especially - and are something of a worry to conservationists. Occasionally the subject of amused news reports, so I wasn’t completely shocked.

That is one ambitious 'pie!

Even before messing with it, this was ISO8000 (i.e. under shade), so everything is a bit softer than I’d like, and now I look, I should really have seen if I could have done better than a pure black eye!

Macro lens?

Anyway, I do like the contrast of the sharp detail on the grass and the bokeh in the background. What would have been glorious would be adding golden sunset light to the grass tips, but sadly light just doesn’t do that, does it?

Embarrassingly low effort, but I just use Google Drive Shared Folders, read-only mode, and forgo any curation of what is seen (e.g. no imposed order, text, etc.).

In passing, this might read as a suggestion to go buy one of these filters. I would actually suggest thinking long and hard before doing that. Really, their only use is photoing the sun on a clear day, and so:

• Eclipses - a very slightly jagged dark circle out of a bright circle
• Sunspots - black blotches on a bright circle
• Conceivably solar flares, but I’ve never even tried for them (and probably even at their strongest, at the best angle, less than 5% of the diameter of the sun - I’m worried by my google results on that!)

On the flip side, these things are expensive (needing to be optical quality)and likely limited to one diameter of lens.

There is something deeply satisfying about making your own solar observations, but you may feel replete after very few photos!

Solar filters are the way. Thousand Oaks site has comments like:

"TRANSMISSION: 1/1,000th of 1%. Solar image is yellow orange. Safe for both visual and photogenic use. "

I can’t entirely guess what your normal daylight settings would be, but I’d guess your attempted settings are not much less than 1% transmission of that.

Also, even if everything is digital, I’d refrain from pointing an unfiltered camera at the sun for more than a couple of seconds in case of heat damage from focussed light.

Really nice photo, what were you taking it with, and what sort of distance?

My Robin story I love to trot out is as follows.

Once upon a time in England there were Redbreasts and Wrens.

This wasn’t good enough for poets, so we had Robin Redbreasts and Jenny Wrens (amongst other birds and animals Reynard the Fox, for instance).

But time went by, and people sometimes started just calling them Robins and Jenny’s. The former caught on, so the common use name became Robin, while Wren stuck better. However, you will still hear the two part names from time to time.

Just in case it helps with further online research - according to Wikipedia, a super telephoto lens is one with a (maximum) focal length of over 300mm, a superzoom lens is one with well over x3 difference between shortest and longest focal lengths.

So, those lenses discussed so far are definitely super telephoto, but are mostly, or all, not super zoom.

Alas, I can’t help on actual subject of your interest: mine is bird photography and so rarely want to be at anything other than maximum focal length (and I even found a 600mm Prime lens pleasing and effective to use). For sports, I can well imagine a good zoom (if not super zoom :) ) is very useful, to swap quickly from overall pitch to individual player.

Top two look weird from aggressive playing with histogram tool, moving the top and bottom limits right in to where the sun’s range of brightness runs. I was a bit surprised it emphasised the orange so much, given I wasn’t tweaking the RGB curves.

Heh, no, just a lack of a fourth interesting photo variant.

It was still slightly hazy - but I definitely got lucky considering I woke to a forecast of “Partially Cloudy”

If you are lucky you can get suitably filtered shots of the sun through cloud - obviously don’t look directly, or purely through optics, but if you’ve a live digital display (e.g. most mirrorless cameras), it can work. The following was purest luck, that I’d no right to expect - I was just amusing myself seeing what my camera made of a hazy circle of light behind thick cloud. And yes, those are sunspots, I checked the sunspots for that day.

That’s what I’d expect of any of the small insect-eating birds! Worth it when the snap works, though!