Finally Spring

Welcome to NPN. your exposure is OK, but I think your photo will have more impact if the goose was not centered. I suggest cropping off from the bottom and if there is room, from the left side as well. You could also try a vertical composition to keep the reflection. Thanks for sharing.

Stephanie, A very reasonable effort. Your exposure is a bit hot (over) and you can see this in the loss of detail in the cheek and at the white portion of the tail. This is likely due to using auto for the exposure without having set some negative compensation because it will have been influenced by what was likely dark water. The other thing to watch is the point of focus, which looks to be the shoulder area on the goose. Where it was angled toward you the head is now at the limits of your depth of field and so is a little soft. You are on the right track.

Welcome, Stephanie. John and Rick have given you some excellent advice. My only addition to that is that you said this was taken in the late afternoon, which shows in the image. It's extremely difficult to get a good exposure of a high contrast subject like this in bright sun. Rules are made to be broken but high contrast and highly saturated subjects like many flowers do best on overcast days or in early morning or late evening soft light. This is a creditable effort and as Rick noted, you're on the right track. Keep them coming.

Thank you for the comments! Very useful to someone as new to this type of photography as I am. I played around with processing (something I am also new to) and composition and did get some better results. As to the late afternoon light, I was back there (with tripod) yesterday morning in a filtered sunlight and took some more shots of the geese, but also got an opportunity to shoot 2 eagles flying low over the swamp. Being an amateur as I said and relying on my camera's auto setting I stretched the ability of my zoom referenced above so no shots worthy of critiquing here, but exciting nonetheless. Thanks again.