Twisted wrote:Aye a lot of the pics where proper spur of the moment using which ever setting I had the camera on (I.e the Bird in flight) to be honest this is the first time I used the camera properly.
A tip I was given for wildlife shooting (and shooting in general tbh as I don't actually shoot wildlife much), if your camera is sitting idle always leave it set TV (time value) mode with a fast shutter speed set. That way if you need to quickly grab it for a motion shot it's ready to go. It gives you a chance of getting that immediate shot off with half decent settings. Blur (camera shake or motion blur) will spoil more pictures than anything else.
I also recommend having the smallest area light metering option set and centre point focus only, that's all that's needed for the majority of shooting IMO, but that is a personal choice. I find it easy enough to focus on my subject, semi-depress the trigger, then reframe the shot if my focal point is not centre frame. Same with metering. I also find that method really makes me think about subject framing and not just have everything dead centre, though that can be adjusted in post processing with cropping to some degree of course.
You may find you shots are dark because of the bright light you were probably shooting in. It's really worth finding out how light metering works, stuff like how 18% grey fits in, dynamic ranging and reading the histogram. It may sound daunting at first but it will really help you get the light correct when you take the shot. There's a million and one tutorials online about this stuff, sorry I don't have time to dig out a link, I will if I remember next week.
I may sound like I know what I'm on about but I still suck at photography

Plenty of reading the theory, not enough practice!