Really excellent photos.
Very impressive detail, especially for offshore birds. Could you please expand on your gear selection and shooting techniques?
Camera is Canon R7, with RF 100-500 f4.5-7.1 L lens. I set the shutter speed at 1/4000 (electronic shutter), kept the lens wide open, and let the camera set ISO. These pics were in strong light so ISO was low; early in the day I got some not-so-nice images in fog.
I have it set so I can toggle between three autofocus modes but on the boat I used whole-area most of the time. Eye detection ON, subject tracking ON.
Burst mode set to the second-highest rate (H, not H+), which with the ES I think is 15 fps.
These were saved as jpegs in-camera using the high-res and Fine Detail settings. Post-processed a little with ACDSee, cropping and adjusting light.
Thanks for the compliments! It has taken me several months to figure out how to use this camera effectively, and I am still in the learning curve. It is quite complex with many different settings to keep track of. I messed up some early shots because I keep forgetting to check all the settings, and somehow the ISO had gotten reset to a fixed speed, which resulted in badly exposed images. And of course tracking the birds was extremely difficult, as it was quite a rough sea (mixed swell, NW 5 feet at 6 seconds and WNW 3 feet at 8 seconds, resulting in a "confused sea state"). I didn't post any of the hundreds of images with only part of a bird, or just sea or sky... or all the ones where the camera couldn't focus on the bird as it raced through the waves... etc.
What made these images possible was the birds themselves - we had a lot of activity near the boat for a long time, with many birds repeatedly circling the boat. Many times I would fail to get onto a bird in time, and watch it circle around so I could get onto it for another try. That also enabled me to get in a position with the sun at my back and try to catch the bird with light in its face, as in some of these shots, instead of the usual backlit silhouette.