Kelly, I mainly use shutter priority and am always changing it depending on if its cloudy out or sunny, if I know I'm going to be shooting birds in flight and so on. For the above pheasant pics - it was a real sunny day, my shutter speed was set to 1/500 and aperature was 7.1 White balance was set to auto and sharpness to vivid. I think it was that it was just a perfect day lightingwise. On cloudy days I struggle quite a bit, most of the time my pics don't come out near as sharp - probably something I'm doing wrong, as you can tell with the grouse pics in the other thread - they are not at all sharp - it was cloudy and snowy day. Heres some more from a sunny day.