Birds in flight

[CMM1965]

Just trying to have some fun. On the banks of the North Saskatchewan River, Edmonton AB,Canada. Birds in flight was the exercise of the day.
Would love comments and criticism, teachable moments.
Having just joined the group 1week ago this will be my first post. Hello all from Edmonton AB, Canada.

[connectinfosoft]

What a classical captured it is really impressive

[Dave Humphries]

Welcome to CiC "CMM1965",

Not a bad set of gull images, my thoughts are as follows;

1) In post processing, the image would benefit from a little added 'canvas' on RHS, filled with a background cloned, or these days AI-filled, to reposition the bird slightly in the frame. Just 10% image width would help I feel as that right wingtip is very close to the edge of frame. Of course, if you have more of the background that you cropped off, you could just re-crop.
2) Good framing on this one! And knowing how difficult gulls can be to capture, I cannot suggest anything else.
3) Again, the composition is far from ideal, but as above, I know what real-life is like, when I was shooting gulls (2009-2010), adding canvas and filling with sky or background was a skill I had to learn - it is far easier these days.
4) and 5) unfortunately prove that the rear end of any wildlife is rarely a satisfactory angle - I know that's annoying when all the front views had bits missing, or were out of focus!

By all means have a look at my Gulls album on Pbase - you'll see they're not much better than yours - and mine were a tame lot, as I was shooting by the river Thames in Windsor (UK, not Canada) for the majority - and the tourists feeding them caused a frenzy and plenty of chances to get shots!

https://pbase.com/dhumphries/gulls

If you have a wider look round my "Birds" shots on Pbase, you'll see that shooting at "Bird of Prey" demos was often a productive exercise too, see this for a Tenerife example.

One final thought, do not despair at your shooting ratio, I must have thrown out 99 shots for every decent one in the albums here. In my defence, Auto-Focus wasn't as good on a Nikon D5000 or D7100 as it is on current models. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!

Out of interest, what are you shooting with?

Hope that's helpful,
Dave