Soft light, with excellent colors shown on the back. Effective head turn. The lines in the water make me want to rotate the image CCW a bit.
DOF always a challenge in over the back shots, and you obviously didn't have a lot of light to work with, and no tripod, so not a lot of options.
You can experiment and don't focus on the eye, but a bit further back in these situations, to allow your DOF to fall more effectively straddling the focus point, and not wasting DOF behind the head where not needed. This is hard to remember to do, since we are so focused on the eye being sharp, but in this type of shot, once you get a few focused on the eye, move your focus point gradually closer to you to try and maximize your effective DOF.
Because of the angle of gaze, a bit more room to the left if you have it.
Nice look back pose and like Randy said showing the colors on the back. Over all it looks a little dark to me. Is there a reason you had the EC to -1. By raising this you could have gained shutter speed and gotten a much sharp shot. I try not to go much below 1/1250 to freeze the action. Agree with Randy on the CCW. I believe the DOF will give you 2/3 behind the focus point and 1/3 in front of the focus point. Like the flow of water in the background, pretty cool reminds me of a landscape shot. Love shooting these guys take the opportunities when you can most people are not able to. TFS
Gary, I shot this at EC -1 because I was blowing out the whites at the higher exposure settings. I am confused when you say raising the EC will give a faster shutter speed. Dropping the EC will mean a faster shutter speed at a given aperture in my experience. It was a very overcast day when I shot this but since I rarely get a chance with this species I tried to make the best of of it. Thanks again.....
I believe Gary mis-spoke on the shutter speed. At -1 EC you get a faster shutter speed. Also 1/320 sec more than fast enough for a static subject like this. This is the type of image some fill-flash can be helpful to brighten up the darker parts of the bird w/o illuminating the highlights as the ambient light was providing adequate illumination there.
To expand on the DOF comment I made. Gary was right for shorter focal lengths, but as you go longer, the distribution changes.
This table shows how the distribution of DOF around the focus point varies with focal length.
Distribution of the Depth of Field
Focal Length (mm) Rear Front
10 70.2 % 29.8 %
20 60.1 % 39.9 %
50 54.0 % 46.0 %
100 52.0 % 48.0 %
200 51.0 % 49.0 %
400 50.5 % 49.5 %
In practical terms, for bird stuff, assume 50/50 and you won't be to far wrong.
Wood Duck
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