Wally,


The Hornbills are a beautiful bird, something we don't see in the wild here for sure. The first shot you had a good pose and head angle but you need to crop from the right and add canvas to the left toward where the bird is facing.


The exposure problem looks like you lost detail in the blacks....you might go back to your RAW images (hopefully you were in RAW mode) and look at the histogram to see if the blacks are clipped...if not you can re-convert them with adjustment of the blacks and bring the detail back.


The 5d II is awesome at high ISO so (use the Sunny 16 rule) for birds use your center sensor in manual mode and push the ISO up enough to give you a nice high shutter speed around 1/1000 or faster and around f/7.1 or so for adequate DOF. ALso the 5d II has enough pixels to allow a little bigger crop without losing image quailty.


Those are nice pics....keep going and post some more


Joel