OhLook wrote in post #15634287
Yes, and most of the ones posted on this board are better. That's what bothers me. It feels like trying to play with the big kids and finding out that it was a mistake.
Everyone has to start somewhere! It's a learning process, and personally I think bird photography is one of the most difficult types of photography, and can be very frustrating but can also be very rewarding.
Sometimes I look at mode, aperture, exposure, and ISO. Those data together fall short of telling me how the photographer accomplished the result. There's more to making a good photo than numbers.
I've been reading at Wikipedia about things like focal distance, but the articles get too technical very quickly for a reader not educated in optics.
Agreed. I certainly didn't understand any of the technical stuff when I started. So for me it was a matter of reading/hands on/looking at examples and doing that over and over until it started to sink in. Here's a good book to read to get started with some basics: Understanding Exposure.
Here's one question so elementary that everyone else apparently learned the answer long ago. Try not to laugh, please. What does the "200 mm" in the title of this thread refer to? Inputting "focal length" at Wikipedia brings up the article "Focal distance," but to me focal distance is the distance from a lens to its fixation point. That's what it means for the lens of the human eye. Surely, though, those bald eagles in the photos were farther than 200 mm from the camera. What and what are 200 mm apart?
And it's the same for a camera lens - the fixation point is the sensor. So the 200mm is from where the light enters the lens to where it converges at the sensor. I think this link illustrates it pretty well. Yeah, I know it's a Nikon link... 
Here's another cool illustration of the same scene at different focal lengths (Canon link this time!!)
Having seen more bird photos here, I'm not convinced that mine are the absolutely blurriest, so here we go. This is one of the two I removed earlier. White-Crowned Sparrow, cloudy day, handheld G15, Tv mode, 1/400, 2.8, ISO 250 (Auto), focal length 30.5 mm, no zoom. I was maybe 15 feet away. Exposure is okay, but the degree of sharpness is disappointing. I thought 1/400 would be fast enough. What would I have had to do to get better feather detail?
The problem with your photo is not the shutter speed, but that you are at 30.5mm and 15 feet away from a small songbird, you had to crop it pretty heavy, thus losing detail in the image. This is one of the challenges of bird photography - most birds are tiny and fast, and even with super telephotos you still have to be quite close to them in order to get detailed, frame filling images.
For the shot you posted and what you tried to accomplish with it (a portrait shot of a small songbird), you are at a disadvantage with the type of camera you have... smaller sensor, not as fast as an SLR, less focal length. But that doesn't mean you have to give up, you just have to work within what you have available. All of us have to do that. So a few strategies you can use within the limitations of your equipment are to learn which wild birds are tame enough for you to get closer to them, taking shots including more of the environment rather than pure portraits, photograph larger birds, practice on captive subjects, try digiscoping, etc.
I hope that helps answer some questions for you!
