>>3641189>>3641196Glad it helped! I actually just use the tamron 150-600 G2 as well. It's good bang for buck in my opinion, though there are definitely times I am wishing I had an f4 600mm lens for more light and more background separation.
For your questions:
3) shutter speeds will vary a lot depending on a lot of things--species of bird, focal length, handholding/tripod technique, distance, and how blurred or frozen you want stuff. A bigger bird will flap slower and depending on the part of the wing stroke a slow speed might capture it. A hummingbird you will need to use a multi-flash setup to freeze the wings as even 1/4000 could have some blur. There is of course a matter of taste, some people hate any wing blur and others don't mind the tips of wings getting soft.
As a general rule of thumb, I like to shoot at around 1/320 for static birds using the tamron lens at 600mm (900 equiv on my crop body). It is about as slow as I can shoot handheld (so lowest ISO in the situation) and get 100% of shots without motion blur from hand movement, and freezes a bird just sitting on a branch. For birds in flight I will go to 1/1000 or if there is more light do more if I can like 1/2000 or more. You can get a bit of grain to get the bird frozen, then either live with that or use denoising software like Topaz or Neat Image. If the light is poor or you want to be artistic you can shoot like 1/30 and try for a panning shot. You will need to follow the bird exactly and try to get the head sharp and then the background and wings will be an artistic blur. It can look really nice but will take many failed attempts and some luck to get the shot.
5) It's basic post processing. You might slightly brighten the eye or head of a bird to bring more attention to it, or darken some part of the background to make it less distracting. The key is to keep it subtle so it improves things but doesn't stand out as fake. You can find some youtube videos or blogs that go into detail on this.
