Getting your shutter speed down is easy. Simply dial in a smaller aperture (f/8 or higher) or lower your ISO. Since during flight shots the background is mostly blue sky, you'll get very fast shutter speeds on a sunny day. Watch out for when a bird flies lower and your background turns green, as your shutter speed will dramatically drop. In general I try to keep my shutter speed between 1/800 and 1/2000. At 1/2000 if the background changes and the shutter speed drops, I'm not so worried that I'll get a blurry shot.
I really need your help. I was not happy with any of my flight shots of the harrier. I know you shoot RAW and had the Canon 300mm f/2.8 IS L lens, but I was wondering, how did your pictures come out? The pictures I took of the harrier, none were sharp and the head was dark.
My images of the harrier were alright. I had three passes total yesterday and I was able to adjust the camera settings a little each time to get better results. About 50% of my images of the harrier were in focus. It was a bit more of a challenge using the Canon 300mm f/2.8 IS L lens plus Canon 2x converter because that combination makes focusing a bit slow, somewhat like the Canon 100-400mm f/3.5 – 5.6 IS L lens.I found from the previous passes that the sky was very bright making the harrier very dark, so I added +1 exposure compensation to bring more details out in the bird. To get it as bright as I wanted I had to further adjust the exposure in the RAW image about another +1/4 stop. That makes the image a bit washed out, and then I had to adjust the blacks and contrast back in. RAW makes processing more flexible.
I was wondering what you do if you get a bird flying and it is full frame. When you go to print it, how do you print it without cropping and cutting off some of the wing or if is too close to the edge to mat?
I believe what your asking has to do with the image's aspect ratio. Canon cameras create files in the 3x2 format (more commonly known as 6x4), which is fine if you are printing images with the same ratio (i.e. 3x2, 6x4, 12x8, 18x12, etc). However, if you print to a different format, say 11x 14 you'll end up cropping part of the image. So if you have something that is full frame and tight, you'll cut off part of the image you want to keep. There are a couple ways to get around this. The first is when printing, in Adobe Photoshop, I use the scale to fit media check box. This will fit the image on to the paper size but you'll get white borders around the image. The other method I use only works if you have a clean background such as an almost solid green on blue. Use the canvas dialog in Photoshop to add more canvas around the image so that you get an aspect ratio of 14x11 (or 11x8.5, etc). Then use the clone tool to clone in the background of the original image to the blank part of the canvas.
