Please forgive me if this topic has been previously addressed. In using the forum's search tool, I did not see my particular issue posted, but I've possibly overlooked it.
For the past year, I've been using a 6D combined with a 400mm 5.6/L for bird photography. Wanting more reach and a higher burst rate, I bought the 7D Mark II last week and placed the 400mm lens on it. I went through the manual and made settings that I thought would work well. Borrowing from my 6D settings: 1/2000 sec, f/7.1, ISO Auto. Depending on the size of the bird in flight, I would sometimes adjust the f/stop to get eye and wings in focus. So, those are the basic settings I made for my new camera. I also selected Case 3 (tweaking the parameters a bit for my tastes) and headed out to shoot. I found out quickly that the crop sensor does not perform well at higher ISO settings, so, I limited the ISO to 800 when in the ISO Auto mode. That did not improve the images. So, I've opened up the aperture to the lens's maximum of 5.6. The images are still unusable with regard to noise and softness. Since I'm shooting primarily birds in flight, I can't lower my shutter speed and, as stated previously, the aperture is wide open and combined with a maximum ISO of 800. Even in good light when the camera is capturing an image at ISO 200, the image is still unusable. I've attempted to troubleshoot this by taking some shots of a brick wall at differing settings to see if the camera is focusing properly - all images at different shutter speeds, f/stop settings, and ISO selections are tack sharp.
I'm a newbie at this; so, my bag of troubleshooting tools is severly lacking. I would appreciate any and all advice on this issue.
Many thanks for taking the time...
