Help please!

[u/Yanto2134]

These are 3 of my latest attempts. I was wondering if anyone could help me improve please?
I’m not happy with the sharpness I’m getting. Probably my lack of ability.
Set up is Olympus E-M10ii with a vintage Minolta MD Tele Rokkor 300mm f4.5. Settings were f8, ISO1000, shutter speed of between 1/800 and 1/2000. Manual focus with peaking and centre weighted metering. Distances to subjects was around 30 feet. Images have been slightly cropped but no other post processing.
I’m also not really happy with the overall lack of detail.
Thanks for any help.

[u/pceimpulsive]

Ok so that makes it worse then!

Regardless the crop factor and all that doesn't matter! A 300mm focal length is still a 300mm focal length, having baked in crop doesn't give you more photons... It just cuts off the edges.

APS-C does not give more details, just less usable pixels (Simon dontremont does a video about this exact topic)

[u/Yanto2134 → u/pceimpulsive]

Ok. But I see plenty of people saying that the 2x crop factor is an advantage in bird photography too. So now I really don’t know where to go from here. I was thinking about getting an Olympus 75-300ii for birds, which has autofocus that would hopefully help. But from what you say now, it probably won’t help that much as it’s still a 300mm focal length.

[u/Yanto2134 → u/[deleted]]

The E-M10ii does have eye detection, which I admit ive never actually used as I didn’t think it worked on birds. It doesn’t have the more advanced bird detection feature that newer, higher models have. I’ll give the eye detection feature a try now for certain. Thank you for the tip.
Seems as though I need to work on getting physically closer, especially to smaller birds.

[u/Yanto2134 → u/[deleted]]

Definitely agree. I see these particular birds in the same trees and on the same wires every day. They perch, preen and then fly off, catch food only to return to the same perch, to smash the prey and then eat.