Bird Watching: Best setting for birds, 1 by Mrs_Ed

Mrs_Ed wrote:
Leanne, looks like your ISO was actually only 160. If you switched that to something higher, as Margaret suggested, you can increase shutter speed.

According to the specs for your camera, you should be able to go as high as 1/2000 of a second. That's pretty good. Maybe mess around a bit with manual and shutter priority settings (or others), and not the intelligent ISO since that's not happening for you.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0701/07013106panasonicfz8.asp

Having said all this, I do have to agree with Linth that sometimes you just have to be really close to get anything decent. At least that is my experience especially with with my Point and Shoot, but sometimes even with my DSLR at 300mm.