I think you have some winners here.Our local library is having a photo contest and the theme is garden. While I have a garden, I forgot to water it enough during our drought and it doesn't look good enough for photos so I concentrated on pollinators on the flower garden. We were allowed to enter 3 photos and should find out the results on Sept 5th. The winner gets a gift certificate to a local fruit market.
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Thanks!Good luck!!
I may try using my D850 this afternoon and see what type of results I get. The ISO at 6400 is just my preference and where they seem to come out best for me. Most of my photos don't get cropped to much because I am no more than 10 feet from most of the birds when I take their photo.I tried various ISOs in preparation for a talk on hummingbirds. I found that after running it through Topaz, or even using the denoise feature in Lightroom, an ISO 8,000 image was just fine. I even printed a 13x19 print to see if the detail would stand that kind of enlargement. It did. I posted a thread about that a few weeks ago.
Of course, I'm using a full frame camera, which helps with noise, although I have been cropping them, sometimes a fair amount. You might be able to get by without as much cropping with your crop frame sensor.