Wildlife photography (including Ducks) is just about the most challenging form of photography (and one I don't really enjoy. Too much reliance on gear and patience).
I know this about it though. There are only 2 rules of basic Wildlife photography:
Rule 1 - If it's not 100% tack sharp it's crap.
Rule 2 - You must always remember rule 1
In that respect you almost always need a high shutter speed so 1/1300 is fine. Sharp with image-noise beats blurred without image-noise so set camera to >1/1000 and let the camera sort the rest out.
The Duck looks sharp to me (Feathers are a nightmare for revealing when you didn't get it spot on) and the water droplets look frozen.
Birds are bastards for not keeping still. A Camera's LCD is rarely good enough to reveal the tiny amounts of motion-blur that render a wildlife photo useless.
Image-stabilisation helps to some extent but not if the bird is moving quickly/jerkily, that always needs high shutter speeds.
If you can't get all of a subject sharp (let's say you use a big bright telephoto lens, then you MUST get the eyes sharp, at the expense of everything else).
You can always get creative I suppose but get the eyes tack sharp and you'll be forgiven most everything else. Get that focus point over the eye.
Congrats on your new toy.
100% tack sharp. (I was helped by the fact that the Eagle was secured to a post with a tether at a Hampshire Hawk Conservancy.. but let's pretend it's looking for prey in Northern Minnesota and I had waited for 3 months in a hide).
If you check the EXIF data you'll see I broke most of my own rules for this photo.. but it wasn't moving very much at all.
