Olivia, That's a pretty state of the art camera, I'm impressed by it's ability to go to 5000 asa. 7.1 Mpx is more than enough. You can also use the thru the lens viewfinder and the screen. I never use the digital zoom on those things to go up to 100x. It looks funky and it's very hard to find your target with that much magnification. With the geese I would go to the maximum analogX, see if you can see them either on the screen or the viewfinder and practice, it doesn't cost anything. You can practice on a garage basketball hoop that's the same distance and the same size until you get it right. Keep your shutter speed as fast as possible but be aware you will lose your depth of field the faster you go.
What I do when I am on the road or sea. Is download the days shooting on my laptop. Then I crop them on the laptop with Adobe Photo Editor. They even have auto fix, which does a pretty job in a lot of cases. But then you can tweak it easily. That way I can use Max resolution and not worry about filling up the photo card. Then I burn a disk on the laptop of each day shots so if something happens to it, so I'm not SOL.
Hope that helps, I wish I had the Camera in my hands. Also I don't read the entire manual, I take a new camera out and play with it, See what I'm doing wrong and right. My Daughter's think I'm Nuts and should read everything but they are so well versed in Techno speak I'll leave it to them to find out how to use a camera as a alarm clock.
Kathy, By getting paid I've learned by working for publications sometimes just an offer for a free hotel room doesn't pay all the bills. Someone wanted me to shoot a horse show in Kentucky. "You can stay at the Hilton." However that doesn't cover food, gas, etc, plus all the work I put into it. See the Santa Barbara Polo tread on my website. Those guys paid me $50 per photo that they used. Didn't even cover the gas one way. I go up to Colorado once a year to do a horse show. These are my friends and I just give them the pictures as long as they give me credit. You have to get published to get your work out there but you just can't work and and lose $, as my CPA tells me. That's good though Kathy, there is lot of other photographers out there and competition can be tough.
