Advice please.

[Talon 1]

At the moment being a fairly newbie to SLR's i have become Semi-Automatic with my D70.
What i mean is i tend to set the aperture and let the camera choose the Shutter speed .
Is this correct?
I had a fiddle the other day and some shots where good but others rather Dark?
The air shots where reasonable but i tended to shoot with the Dial on the Shutter speed in this case the highest and let the camera choose the Aperture (opposite way round so to speak).
I then let of 7 picture bursts . They came out rather Dark again?
My close up Stationary shots i was happy with and this was a set up of F8 on Aperture.
What are the best setting up for general bird in Flight shots so i can make a bench mark so to speak??
And whats going on with the darkness (some very dark in some cases)
Help for a Dumbo Please B (:

[rezMole]

I tend to meter from some neutral objet such as the ground, hold the settings with exposure lock and then shoot the birds in the sky - that is, if i remember!

If the birds in the sky are reasonably close, then the Nikon's spot metering usually works fine - providing you have your camera set to spot meter.

[stevo]

Hi Free

The way I set my exposure is to take a shot then look at the histogram on the lcd,from there I can work out whether to +/- the exposure compensation.In general I underexpose my shots to get a faster shutter speed then adjust in C1 SE.

Hope this helps(this is only my way of doing it but it works for me)

Cheers Steve.