[mlag]

My cooking recipe for macro with tele lenses:
- For zooms, set your lens at max tele (300mm) or use long tele with short minimum focus distance. Maybe add teleconvertor 1,4x to increase magnification without impacting minimum focus distance.
- get as close as possible ( ~minimum focus distance) for max magnification. Maybe use an extender ring between body and lens to reduce focus distance and increase magnification.
- set aperture at f8...f10 to increase depth field a bit, because dof is narrow , less than an inch, for tele’s in macro use. A large butterfly already challenges the borders of sharpness and dof.
- keep your shutter speed fast, below 1/200 to reduce effect of camera shake ( there is a rule that says use 1/nnn if you have lens of nnn mm, but if you have ibis stabilisation it can be bit longer, (but aps-c increase : take 1.5x nnn as reference due to cropfactor )).
- increase ISO to get exposure right , like 3600 or bit more- depends on noise level of your camera- , it is easier to correct in postprocessing noise than unsharpness from a shutter speed like 1/60 or so
- using bright daylight, maybe you can set shutter to 1/500 or so and lower iso to 400. But in general, expect light to be a challenge f8 1/200 and iso 3600 can already be challenge. A bit underexposure up to -1EV is acceptable and can be corrected in post, gives bit extra margin.
- set focus to center area where your subject should be... mostly AFS unless it moves AFC. Center focus is needed because your subject should be in the narrow depth of field...not the background nor foreground which will be included in focus if let the camera focus on full frame area. Use centerpoint focus if you want to focus a specific item, like head or eyes ....
- shoot series of 3..5 pics. There is always one less shaky and more sharp...and most likely you refocus also a tiny bit between pictures if you shoot handheld. Pushing the camera button might influence first pics shake, refocusing might correct dof...
-if you can , use tripod...

[miles]

The trick is to get close.
The closer you are, the bigger the subject in the VF, easier for the camera to know what the subject is. And of course you get many more pixels on the subject. Getting close takes patience, time practice, and experience. You must have some knowledge about the wildlife you want to photograph. Where they live, when they rest, when they eat, whet they are scared of. A lot depends on the time of day, angle of the sunlight, and wind, etc. And some camo. Less on the camera. My 2 cents!
Miles

[Hayashi]

If you rely on AF-C (instead of switching back and forth from AF.S and AF.C) then I would suggest AF.C SEL-EX S. This will allow the camera to use the center point AF for initial focus and track from there. Or use AF.C SEL AF (only uses a 5 point array in the center of the viewfinder). For shooting static subjects but you want AF.C in case they move, I would use my first suggestion of SEL-EX S.

Just try it out, it works much better !

Thank you for your advice

[Hayashi]

Some shots here, hope you guys like it