Ospreys from Orange Beach, AL

I spent last weekend in Orange Beach, AL. I found several Osprey nests in the area. These were taken with my 40D, 300mm F4L IS and 1.4x TC. I would love some suggestions for improvements. I know I was taking these at the wrong time of day. The sun was directly overhead. I am also struggling with processing RAW files. Any help would be appreciated.

Nice captures in difficult conditions!
3 looks underexposed, maybe you can up the brightness dial in the RAW tab of DPP gently and see how that looks. Look at warming up them a bit too in the white balance and see how that looks

You have some really great expressions from this bird here and some fine "forward thrust" in focus photography of the bird. These shots are dieing for some detailed post processing because they are so fantastic as is, especially the last shot. That is really a beautiful "moment" photo!

Suggestions:

Do some selective sharpening of the subject
Increase contrast, but not to the point that it is unreal looking
Crop the bird so that the focus is on the expression, but don't center compose on the mouth, leave it offset a bit
Clone out the incidental twigs that are easy to dissolve into the background, especially the one closest to the mouth.
I also added a bit of saturation to the head and especially the eyes in order to draw attention to the emotion and moment

Here's a quick example of what I am suggesting above, hope you don't mind. I would not do this normally but suggestions were asked for so here goes...

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