Kulshan head shot

[lovelife65]

Our male pup this morning. Still working on his sister River, as she wants to bite my camera.
A little soft on the nose and far side, but improvement?

[Shadowman]

Nice effort, the facial style of some animals make for challenging levels of sharpness, depth of field, and as in your case controlling or handling movement of your subject. The eyes should be at their sharpest but you can always seek to balance your style by what your center of interest (teeth/fangs, whiskers/ears, eyes, etc.) happens to be. You've captured very good sharpness on the eyes and the fur has very good detail.

[pschlute]

Oh yes this is lovely. You have captured the spirit of the doggy.

Getting snout and eyes and head in focus I find needs f8-f11 when using 85mm on FF sensor. But depending on your shot as long as the eyes are spot on you have the makings of a very good picture.

[lovelife65]

Nice effort, the facial style of some animals make for challenging levels of sharpness, depth of field, and as in your case controlling or handling movement of your subject. The eyes should be at their sharpest but you can always seek to balance your style by what your center of interest (teeth/fangs, whiskers/ears, eyes, etc.) happens to be. You've captured very good sharpness on the eyes and the fur has very good detail.

Thank you John.
I could have used a smaller aperture, but the background was not that interesting. Still learning to capture the wiggly creatures.

[ucci]

I cannot not, would I even dare try, to add a technical comment like those already posted. But I wonder if I might suggest you try something if you have a copy of this pic pre any cropping ? It is to do with something I recall reading many years ago. It related to having more background showing on the side to which the subject was looking. So as a suggestion, what if you had the pup's head moved slightly more to right of frame giving more background showing left of field? Who knows, you may truly hate the end result of doing this. But it is the sort of thing I might be tempted to try. But, hey, it is your work, and not mine.

[NorthernFocus]

What a handsome little guy, Sharon.

In way of critique, excellent exposure and the eyes are a sharp as a tack. IMO with dogs it is important to also have the nose in focus. As others have pointed out, if you have a good clean BG and enough light the simplest solution is to use a tighter aperture. Also contrary to everything you may read/hear if you need the wide aperture then sometimes it is better to focus on the bridge of the nose, corner of the mouth, etc, in order to bring both nose and eyes within the DOF. Compositionally as UCCI pointed out conventional wisdom is to leave more room on the side of frame that the subject is looking/moving towards.