Ring-Neck

A nice image of the ring-necked duck. Exposure looks very good to hold detail in the dark head. I do wish the reflection was not cut off at the bottom of the image. I would look at cloning out the white spot in the upper right.

Thanks for your suggestions Keith, here is a cloned image, I cannot crop lower for the reflection.

A good over the shoulder look and good detail on the front of the bird. Looks like tough conditions forced you to a shallower DOF than desirable. I would be tempted to try for double the ISO and stop down. The D3X should handle it. Also, it looks like a CW correction is in order, which might force you to abandon the reflection.

Love the colors. The water color is quite interesting.

Nice colors and detail on the head looks good. I agree with the nits mentioned, but I think f/8 seems like it should have been plenty enough to get this species entirely in focus. So either the less sharp areas are because of motion blur (which I don't think they are based on all of it being the front part of the duck) or because your focus point was too far back to get both front and back in the DOF range. Pretty sure that may have been the reason.

Thanks for the comments, focus was on the head (eye ) of the duck, that is why the tail end was out of focus at f/8.