Blue-winged Teal

[James Salywoda]

Blue-winged Teal
Southern California

This is a tough duck to get around here as the quantities of this species are not in high numbers. But a beauty of a duck.:S3:

Nikon D300s AFS 600 F4
1/2500 F5.6 ISO 800

Thanks For Looking

Jim

[Peter Farrell]

Another stunning flight capture, James. Beautiful duck, captured perfectly.
Peter

[Stu Bowie]

The shooting angle and gliding posture has shown the dorsal view nicely James. Good detail and colours throughout, and separated from the BG very well.

[Pieter de Waal]

Excellent James, colours, exposure and detail perfect. Just love the feather pattern on the neck and back. Beautiful subtle light and great eye contact.

[Daniel Cadieux]

Hard to beat this. Great colours, and the techs are perfect as per usual

[Bhushan Dalvi]

James, beautiful capture. Love the details in this one.

[James Salywoda]

Thanks Everyone!
OK here is a repost I felt the Grey head on the bird was competing with the background. So I did a quick mask on the bird then inversed it and lifted only the background so the colors wouldn't match as much. What do you think?

[Jonathan Ashton]

Both very good indeed I think the repost show the duck of slightly better.

[Danny J Brown]

Goodness gracious....what an amazing shot, even for you Jim. One of your best!

DB

P.S. Repost looks even better but really not necessary.

[Ofer Levy]

Stunning!!! I love it - the soft light works amazingly well in here.

[Steve Uffman]

Mighty fine shot. Unlike your area we have over 100K of these flying through Louisiana mid September. these little dudes seem to fly 70 mph hour. takes great tracking and camera work to catch one-even more so as well you did. not surprised at the shutter speed for them on an overcast day

clearly an impressive shot that you worked hard to get just right. While as a photographer I am in the eager to learn category, i am a veteran and avid waterfowler. Thus, the only thing I can contribute ( which is nit picky I know) is you might want to see if there should be a bit of deep red tint to the eye around the pupil that you can bring out. Its just a hint but I shot several images of them in the wild these week as they start returning to Louisiana for the trip north- albeit the shots were on a sunny day but all of the images of the drake blue wing teal have that slight deep reddish tent to the eye-regardless of how the light is hitting them (not to confuse with red eye although it understandably might not be present in such an overcast day)

Based on the twinkle in the eye, I bet its there. again very fine shot. http://www.ducks.org/news-media/news/6102/duck-of-the-month-blue-winged-teal show a Ducks Unlimited photo that show the reddish tint on the drake.

[James Salywoda]

While as a photographer I am in the eager to learn category, i am a veteran and avid waterfowler. Thus, the only thing I can contribute ( which is nit picky I know) is you might want to see if there should be a bit of deep red tint to the eye around the pupil that you can bring out. Its just a hint but I shot several images of them in the wild these week as they start returning to Louisiana for the trip north- albeit the shots were on a sunny day but all of the images of the drake blue wing teal have that slight deep reddish tent to the eye-regardless of how the light is hitting them (not to confuse with red eye although it understandably might not be present in such an overcast day)

Based on the twinkle in the eye, I bet its there. again very fine shot. http://www.ducks.org/news-media/news/6102/duck-of-the-month-blue-winged-teal show a Ducks Unlimited photo that show the reddish tint on the drake.

Thanks for the comments everyone.

Thanks Steve I really appreciate it yeah I know I have shots of Blue-winged Teal that show the reddish ring but they were in the water in excellent light (Not Flying). Unfortunately the overcast skies didn't bring the color of it out I tried lifting it in PP but when I downsize for the web it's not prominent.:S3: Hopefully I'll get something better in the future that shows it better.

[arash_hazeghi]

Excellent pose and details Jim!

[Tom Rambaut]

Very impressive photo. What more can one say!

[Todd Frost]

Outstanding image James. Nice pose and excellent detail. I like the bg in the re-post better as it give a bit more separation. Well done.
TFS
Todd

[Steve Uffman]

Looks like it just flew off the monitor into my house...very fine work

[James Yule]

nice even sharpness, people take these kinds of shots for granted. I really does take an artist to get a great shot like this.