I shot those images last fall with my Olympus E-3 and E-5 cameras. With my E-3 I used my 70-300 Zukio lens. On my E-5 I used my 90-250 Zukio lens. But they are 4/3 lenses thus they are actually 140-600 and 180-500. the 90-250 lens is the most expensive lens that Olympus makes if I am not mistaken. It's a sweet lens, takes wonderful photos if I do my job, but it it large and needs to be shot off a tripod for best results. With the other camera I just shoot hand held.

I just got into this a few years back. I have been a bow hunter for 50 years but I just wanted to start taking photos as I am pretty good at getting close to critters.

Keep an eye out and I will post some antelope photos. They are a very tough critter to get close to and to get good shots. But bowhunting taught me what I needed to do to get close and time with them spent at close distance taught me a lot also. So hopefully next week I can post some of my antelope photos at I think they are most likely my best work. Whoops I mean pleasure.

And my 90-250 lens is a 2.8 lens.

Have a good one. BB

The comment about rules is valid, however, one must understand the rules before they can be successfully broken. Anyone can break a rule but it will generally be broken in a good way, if you first fully understand the rule. It usually does not work, nor is it a good idea to just go around breaking the rules if you don't first undertand them, because someone said you should, so please bear that in mind.

It is more likely to come from an habitual rule breaker, who just likes to break rules, when a statement reads "rules are meant to be broken". A more informed person might say something like "rules are there for a reason, and once you understnad them properly, then and only then can you successfully break them from time to time to improve upon an image. No disrespect meant to anyone on this list, by the way, so no need to come screaming back with all sorts or responses.

Yours is a very good photo with very good composition and yes the eye is led into the photos by the tongue on the bottom left. Your eye is, however, then led out again because the tongue extends back out of the frame. And that is why this is a very good photo, but if you had included it fully inside the frame, it would have been a great photo with great composition, and there lies the difference.

Had you taken both versions, you would have seen that the image with the entire tongue inside the frame would have been more pleasing to you than the image with the tongue end missing outside of the frame.

As stated, take what feels right to you at the time, then stop and rethink or relook at the scene, through the view finder. Explore the scene with your eye, look all around the viewfinder and see if there is anything you feel could be added to get a better feel.

Try zooming out a little or stepping a few steps back or panning slightly right or left, or switching to an upright format rather than a view/landscape format. That way you get to see if your subject lends itself better to one or the other of those different view formats.

When you have the time, as in this still life, so to speak, use that time to explore all avenues of composition and angle and then you can go home and see what really feels best to the eye/brain of all those different images you took.

As for the eye always being led into the photo from bottom left, as stated by Nikron, this is not true for everyone. This is only valid for westerners and why you may ask? Because we read from left to right and that is why it feels right for us. If we were orientals or middle easterners we would be reading right to left and this photo would not feel right to us and would have been better if the tongue were on the right side, leading us into the photo's main part on the left.

In general, and again this is a rule that once it is understood, can in certain cases be broken, you should always leave negative space to the right of a head shot (if you were to leave any negative space that is) and generally have the person looking or facing somehwat to the right, rather than to the left, in a western world image. The opposite applies for the eastern world.

So to recap, the advice you have heard is, for the most part quite correct. It is always better not to have something sticking out past your frame, if it is part of the main image and if it can be avoided. In your image you could have been a little tiny bit farther away and still had the buildings in the frame, along with the whole tongue of the wagon. Hope this helps.

Getting the shot.
My passion is shooting wildlife and as such much thought goes into taking a shot. I set the camera up for possible shots before I even start walking away from my vehicle--just in case some opportunity should appear.

So here is the shot history. Water creates a glare issue and putting a polarizing filter on a Nikon 200-400 VR lens is not a good option. Thus I waited for an overcast day. I hiked out into the Florida Everglades and located a nesting pair of Great Blue Herons. Then I hiked around the marsh to get the right sunlight direction for the flight of the herons as they built their nest. Because the sky was a dull grey I had to adjust my angle of view to keep the sky out of the photo. Next came the issue of background and subject. I needed to get subject separation from the background. This required a low f-stop setting. I chose f5.6 (the lens would have allowed f4 but the heron is a big bird with wide wings and i wanted sharp focus on the wings. 5.6 gave me a bit more DOF but still allowed for blurring the background. I spent a great deal of time working for the best background possible. I did not want to shoot at the extreme focal length of the lens (400mm) because by shooting at 300-320 mm I would get a greater blur on the background which was the major concern. This required moving me to get into the optimum position. I set the camera on aperture (I always shoot wildlife in aperture mode because it gives me control of the background (DOF) I'll let the camera adjust the shutter. I prefer to shoot at the bottom of the ISO range (200 on my Nikon D300) but due to the light and the speed of the subject I had to raise the ISO to 400. Shutter speed ended up between 1/2000 and 1/2499 for the burst of seven shots. I needed at least 1/1500 to freeze those wing tips.

The camera was set on continuous focus tracking and on spot metering. I used 9 focus points instead of the 54 to help with tracking focus. I used good panning technique (proper elbow and foot positioning) as well as follow through. (all of which I practice in my driveway following bouncing tennis balls) For the flight photos the camera was hand held. It took nearly 90 minutes to allow the bird to make 4 trips to collect sticks. I got about 7 shots on each return trip firing in high continuous mode but waiting for the bird to fill the frame before beginning the burst. Out ofthe 30 plus frames I "kept" 5 frames discarding the others for such issues as framing (lost a few wing tips), twig position, (blocking the eye) or wing position. Over all, I consider this a good flight photo, not a great one. This is a full frame shot with only a tiny bit of cropping to straighten the water line.

Thanks for looking. Feel free to critique the photo or the technique.

Larry