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Published: 2011-07-27 01:02:12 +0000 UTC; Views: 324; Favourites: 19; Downloads: 4
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Description
A female mallard duckRelated content
Comments: 11
There's room for some improvement in this one, so I'll be frank
Fundamentally it's a shot of a duck. Mallards are very common around the world and they are very complicit subjects. So you get a lot of shots of them. Which means that if you want to shoot them you really need to show something different. Different angles, backgrounds, behaviours, colours, but something to make it stand out and make it special.
It's not top down (which is very good, I have seen my fill of top down shots of ducks), but you could get lower. The higher something is in the frame, the more important it appears to be. In this case if you had laid down or crouched really low then you could have got a slightly lower angle where you're looking up at the duck.
The diagonal line from the edge of the whatever it is works well. Diagonals are very visually appealing. Here it makes a good lead line, drawing the eye to the duck.
I would have put the duck more right in the frame, as close to the right edge as possible without chopping anything out of the frame. She's too centred here and a centred composition very rarely works. Try for a rule of thirds instead, it's clichΓ© but it works. Here you could have 2 thirds empty space and 1 third duck. You'd also have the duck looking into the frame then. That is a sort of invisible leading line, you are drawn to the eye first but then you follow it's gaze. So if it is looking out of a frame edge then the rest of the shot gets ignored and it feels unbalanced. That is one of those little changes which makes a massive difference.
I think your exposure is just a little dark. Try upping it a stop.
You have a catchlight, which is very important as it makes the animals look more alive.
I think that it would have benefited from a smaller aperture. The heads in focus, but the tail isn't, and I would have liked to see more feather details on the tail.
I think that's it
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Thanks for the detailed Critique Szaf you definitely gave me a few points to think about.
I kind of wanted to capture more of the horizon or the direction of where the duck was looking at, without sacrificing him too much. I think a wider lens maybe would have been appropriate here (but then again maybe not - I've never tried one 
Looking back maybe I would have taken a few steps back and tried to get more of the lake and moved him to the right. Maybe even have a silhouette of him on overlooking the lake would have made it a bit more interesting.
I liked your point of going even lower and focus more on the head. I'll keep all these in mind for next time
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Thank you
Apparently the brown ones are female and the black/green ones are the male: [link]
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That's correct, there's usually a fair bit of gender dismorphia between the duck sexes,
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