Light as a feather

[Nancy Bell]

I found this feather at a duck pond where the kids throw bread to the birds, outside of Dallas, Texas. In the winter, normally wild ducks crowd the banks for bread as eagerly as the small flock of year-round mallard-types and goose-types! I suspect this feather is from a male Lesser Scaup.

I used the same dark bkgd & set-up as the rose I recently posted. I needed a way to "float" the feather and not have it rest on the bkgd. After scouring my parent's house for an idea I discovered that I could attach the feather to a skewer and thus have it dangle over my dark bkgd.
I did this instead of joining the crowds for shopping on Black Friday:bg3:!

Canon 5D Mark III, Canon 100 f2.8 macro, tripod, macro twin lights, 1/8, f16, ISO 100, +2/3 flash compensation.

C & C most appreciated.

[Diane Miller]

MUCH better than shopping!! And neat idea for the BG. Interesting comparison to the same feather that got a very nice treatment in OOTB. That one is going to be hard to beat!!

[Jonathan Ashton]

Great idea I like the perspective. I am just a little unsure about the lighting. I get the impression it is causing the feather to look a little refractile in certain areas, yet in others it looks excellent.

[Mitch Haimov]

Nice idea and setup, Nancy. I enjoy the originality. The colors and textures in this feather work very well with the (nearly) black BG. Would be ideal for the DOF to cover the entire feather; I'm guessing that wasn't an option in a single exposure. If the air was dead still could have been an interesting one for stacking, but I'm guessing the only way you could have pulled that off would have been with a StackShot system and nobody in the room, ventilation off, etc. If you had backed up a bit you could have picked up a little more DOF and avoided clipping the downy barbs.

[Nancy Bell]

Thank you everyone. I did try stacking with another feather and with all the downy parts it became pretty confusing. Plus I really need to do some studying on that technique.
I get so caught up in the tiny visual details that I forget to pull back some to consider the overall image. Good to be reminded.

[Steve Maxson]

Hi Nancy. I like the black-background studio look for this mostly whitish floating feather. You have good sharpness where you most need it and the feather has a very nice compositional flow. I would only wish that the barbs weren't clipped at the top of the frame - backing up a bit, as suggested by Mitch, would fix that and also give you a little more DOF. You've got a good thing going with your "blackbox!"

[Nancy Bell]

Thanks Steve. Backing up is a very good suggestion and I now consider that when in my "black box".