IMHO taste is very subjective and we don't need to look for a SINGLE best composition. My first impression was I would like to see the entire face. I also tried cropping to just include the sides of the head side-to-side, and from just above the "eyebrows" to just below the beak up-and-down. And I was surprised how striking the resulting image is. Blow it up big and it would scare the hell out of my cat (actually he is sufficiently intelligent not to be fooled by pictures). The D300 is a truly excellent tool and I am sure you will grow to love it. If you are using Nikon's Capture NX software - it is incredibly slow and somewhat unstable on my computer. I don't think it is oversharpened either, by the way