thanks brendan......i can recrop the cardinal so he's looking in. what you said makes sense......and yeah, it is 4000, i had camera set on Av for the f/5.6 and manually set the iso to 800 cause of the cloudy day, extender and c-pol filter on the lens, and thats the exposure the camera set......guess it wasnt as dark as i thought it would be. and around my place, the chickadee are skittish........must be my cats.........lol.......they usually take right off when i am around..........but the nuthatches usually let me get closer......i have a pair building a nest in a nest box i have on an ash tree right at 6'.......i dont want to spook them out of building a home yet, but when they get more use to me hanging around, i'll try my luck on them......i love watching them climbing up and down a tree


jim