Pretty good advice above, Will. But I'll add a bit to it:
You are a long, long way away from the bird. This causes two problems: (a) you have to crop hard and lose lots of detail; (b) your AF system struggles to get accurate focus with such a small target. Yes, it will focus, but it wil only be exactly right by accident.
1/80th is way,
way too low for 300mm. I normally try for 1/1000th or better with bird shots. Now, in this light, you are not going to get it that high, but you can at least get a bit closer to it. ISO 400 is pretty much a standard setting for bird photography; go to 800 if you need to, only drop back to 200 when the light is superb. Your aperture should normally be as close to wide open as you dare, given the limitations of your lens. I'm not sure what your 70-300 is like, but most 70-300s are pretty ordinary and you do need to stop them down a bit - you have to find a balance between two two evils of low shutter speed on the one hand and substandard lens performance on the other.
In this case, you might get the best results at 1/500th, 400i, and f/8 (not really quite fast enough, but getting there). I'm not sure of the abilities of your lens and sensor, you you might want to experiment a bit. If the D40 is not too clean at 400i, you could try 200i, f/5.6 and still 1/500th. If the D40 does OK at 400-800 ISO, then you could try 800i and f/8 for 1/1000th. You have to get to know your own gear. But my guess is that you'll mostly do best at f/6.7 or f/8 and 400 ISO.
Rule #2 of bird photography is shutter speed, shutter speed, and shutter speed! (Rule #1, of course, is get closer to the bird!)
What about VR? Simple rule, doing bird work, you
always use VR. There is
never a reason to turn it off (other than flight shots, which we are not discussing here).
Some basic starter settings for bird work (Use these all the time unless you have a particular reason otherwise.)
- ISO 400
- Aperture priority, set wide open for a top-class lens (Cannon L Series primes, Nikon equivalents); half a stop down for near-prime lenses (Canon 100-400 IS, Nikkor 80-400 VR, any top-class prime with a teleconverter on it, Sigma 150-500, etc.); a whole stop down for anything else. (Stop down fiurther to increase depth of field as desired, but only when you have shutter speed to burn. Always sacrifice desired DOF to get decent shutter speed when in doubt.)
- If your shutter speed is much less than 1/1000th, increase the ISO to 800.
- If your shutter speed is still much less than 1/1000th, open up the aperture a bit more.
- If your shutter speed is still much less than 1/1000th, go to 1600i if your camera can do it with half-decent results (most can't), or get closer and use a shorter lens.
- Don't rely on tripods and self-timers to overcome low shutter speeds. Even when you get everything right and keep the camera perfectly still, you still have to deal with subject movement, and birds, especially small birds, move really fast. (There are exceptions to this, but thy are just that: exceptions.)
Good luck and stick at it!
