rough landing

[kevin99989]

i never knew seagulls looked like this when they landed on water!

Anyways - i'm not sure how I could have done better on the composition?

I like to use the rule of 3rds, but I'm not sure what the "center" of the subject is - the bird, or the wake ?

As usual, all comments welcome!

[Mad Aussie]

Hard case how he has face-planted :)

A good comp will just plain feel right. It can be difficult to compose properly when shooting moving objects especially when they appear out of nowhere and you have shoot quickly. The comp then often comes from cropping in post, so go into very close OR zoom out to give yourself some room to choose your comp when cropping.

I think the bird is the subject, and more specifically, his face-plant. If I had the choice here I probably would have tried to get his face nearer the left of frame to add to his panic as if he might crash into the frame itself.

[kevin99989]

Thanks for the input!! My biggest problem is getting a good focus lock on a fast moving subject. So i keep the aperture at f5.6 to get a little depth of field in case the focus doesn't fully lock in time (I shoot with a Nikon D5000).

[kevin99989]

here it is again!

[Mad Aussie]

That looks way better to me!

Remember also that when you zoom in with a long lens, the depth of field is narrowed dramatically, f5.6 won't give you much DOF at all. Then again, if the subject is a long way away and you zoom in a heap on a long lens, you'll be struggling to get much DOF no matter what you do.