The Mangrove Whistler

Aaaahh.. That wonderful morning...
 I swapped the day off by taking my Canon EOS 7D, EF teleconverter 1.4x and my trusty EF400mm F5.6L for a walk around the neighbourhood's fence line.
This place has a healthy population of birds where anything from a small spider-catcher to an Eagle can be spotted if you are lucky.

The Mangrove whistler

Horrendous lighting conditions
To get the most out of it, you have to set your camera to the lowest ISO.
Lower sensitivity means a tighter and crispier shot.
This also yields you a sharper image.
The enemy for a bird photographer is low-shutter speed.
I set my Canon EOS7D to 1/1250sec.
This would guarantee a clear shot.
There's nothing much I could do about the ISO settings which I had set on 'Auto'.
To compensate for bad lighting conditions, the camera would use a higher-sensitivity light capture.
Your shots may end up 'grainy' and if you blow it up, the colour pixels are not as compact as the lower ISO settings.

The image at 70% crop

 Autofocus and F8
The AF sensor on my EOS7D would not operate with a 1.4x TeleconvertorII.
Apparently, there is not enough light for the sensors to activate autofocussing.
To me, its not an issue.
I've been working with manual focus on my macro shots.
On a long telephoto lens, its just a matter of 'eye-hand' coordination.
I managed to cap off six shots and out of the lot, two came out pretty decent.
A little tweaking on the Adobe Lightroom 4.2 had fixed the exposure...