Right go easy people.
Decide to take the wee man down to the duck pond at the nearby park and after doing some reading and getting a little bit more confident with my camera decided to forgo the usual programed modes etc and go for it manually!!

Anyway, being a dark dismal overcast day, bumped the ISO up to 800 and played about till i got the correct settings on the shutter speed and tried to keep the 70-300mm vr at F5.6 to work on getting the various animals to standout.
Getting the hang of things and using the Histogram is a big help. Most of my previous shots have been way over or under exposed so nice to see some "reasonable" shots.
Anyway - 3 shots from the day that came out ok. (lots of bad ones hit the recycle bin). Hard as it was very over cast and to keep things reasonbale well exposed the shutter speed was bearly over 1/20th sec and keep the f5.6 most of the time.
Cropped slightly and really impressed with the D40 @ 800ISO
Any comments welcome
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Q6600 @ 3.51ghz and rising, P45 DFI, 4gb Kingston Pc8500, Antec 900 and 5850

(all watercooled!)
Nikon D90, 50mm f1.8, 18-105mm VR and 70-300mm VR