[pressld2]

I would say a tripod would be useful, particularly as you had pre-focused. You only have to move a little when hand-holding and your focus point will move with you.

The standard advice for shutter speed when hand-holding is to use the reciprocal of the focal length. As you were set at 96mm you should ideally have been using 1/100th sec instead of 1/60th sec. However, if all the illumination is from the flash it's less important because the flash duration itself will be much, much less than 1/100th sec. So the flash should freeze both subject and camera movement. Was there any other light source? It looks like subject movement on the birds wing so a higher shutter speed would have helped.

Dave P.