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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Photovisions" data-source="post: 1193547" data-attributes="member: 51192">For cluttered backgrounds, using the center point is the best option, otherwise the camera will hunt up and down for the background and possibly foreground objects. However, this the most difficult part of bird photography - keeping that center point on a BIF, especially if it is small and/or far away. I take my hat off to those can manage to get in focus shots.The 1 series camera's do have a nice facility to help here (and why I bought mine). There is an option to turn focus search off. So what you do is roughly focus where the bird is (I tend to do this manually) and with inner 9 focus points on, track the bird and let the Al servo do the rest. The camera does not make large changes in focus to background or foreground objects. Of course I still need to lock with the center point initially.The other major obstacle is holding the bird in the frame and close as possible to the center. This is really hard and when I first started, tended to be too rigid without noticing! If you can relax, it makes such a difference. Lastly knowing what flight path your bird will take helps and for this reason, I find swallows so damn hard, really hit and miss!One more thing - you may find that you need to take several hundred photos and hope that a handful will be acceptable. With time and practise, this will increase proportionally.Good luck.Adrian</blockquote>