This is a nice subject! Ummm, I might have shot a bit more into the light, get some angle to it. I can see you're working to get the whole subject in here but you don't have to do that, worry about that all the time. Here you could miss a fair bit of it and do just fine because the viewer already knows what they're looking at. I can see it was a light bit overcast day too, that's a bit of a drag, always hard to work with and no sky blue.

I may as well use this time and place to mention a couple of general things. I've noticed you tend to center your subjects completely and crop a bit close. Generally you want to lead the eye, particularly if it's a living subject like that bird on the rock, and remember that people read a picture like they do a book, from left to right, lead the eye that way. Also concerning light, the absolute worst time of the day for light is in the middle of the day! It bounces off of everything and washes out the scene. Radiosity is the raytracing terminology for light that bounces off an object and colors it's surroundings so I'll use that term in the future, just to mention that. Anyways, there's no color to daytime light. Check my pictures and notice how many of them are taken in full daylight. Not even! Candy Curls, Poppin Fresh (god I hate thinking of titles) and a shitload more to come will all be from 5:00 am or whenever sunset is. If you've got a good place for pics, try hitting it at sunrise sometime and see how nuts it is then!

Grrr... ^^^

Thanks for the advice -- I'm only learning :)

Actually, for this particular shot, most of them won't have done much good, though... Crop is manual in Photopaint to 1280 -- about 60% of the size of the shot -- to keep the detail w/o scaling down... I was shooting way up, beyong max zoom of the objective I had at the moment, so there's a lot more in the actual shot -- it was about three yards or so almost straight overhead. And yeah, it was overcast -- less than half an hour or so after the snow stopped. I am pretty sure if I waited even a quarter hour more, it'd all melt or fall down...

Bird is a crop, too, from a MUCH larger shot made mostly to count the ones on the opposite shore (it was a trip to the lake chain with that specific purpose in mind).

And I don't quite get what you mean by people reading a picture like text, though... Maybe because I easily read either direction (be it upside-down, sideways, mirrored, whatever) myself, because I was taught completely different stuff in neurophisiology (we studied eye movement over pictures there, too, and it just didn't work that way)?

I think I'll understand it better if I, for example, send you those two pics non-cropped and you show me how to crop them better and why?

This will take time I gotta use elsewhere right now. Will get back to it though.