I posted this in the "Yard Birds" thread but it seems appropriate here as well. I'm in the habit of photographic birds in the old dead oak down the hillside out back from my porch. I keep my F*600 set up on a tripod with a 1.4x TC & K-3. It's pretty much a morning proposition since I'm facing west.
It had been quite a while (months) since a raptor had shown up and then, yesterday--one of the gloomiest mornings I can remember--, this guy showed up. I had to give it a shot but, without the sun at my back, I figured I was just going to get an ugly, noisy silhouette of the bird. In what I thought was a futile gesture, I dropped the shutter speed down to 1/320 and got one shot before he flew off.
It turned out much better that I expected! The saving grace, I guess, was that the sky in the background was too dark to generate the silhouette effect. Also, the colors were nicely saturated because
everything was saturated.