Greater Scaup

As far as I know, this is a female Greater Scaup (I could be wrong though because I'm terrible at ID'ing waterbird species :t3). While I was photographing the Grebe from my previous post, I noticed this small duck swimming towards me out of the corner of my eye. I only had a couple of seconds to rack focus to MFD and shoot a couple of frames without changing my settings before it too disappeared underwater (I wish I was able to stop down). Very minimal NR was applied in PS (almost negligible). This version is heavily compressed to fit within the site's upload regulation.

Camera - Nikon D850
Focal Length - 700mm
Aperture - f/8
Shutter Speed - 1/400s
ISO - 900
Handheld
Manual, Auto ISO
Crop - 75% of full-frame

Lovely detail you captured here Aditya...especially on the bill, it looks like marble. Love the eye. I would leave some more on the bottom, if you have it, and take a little from the top. I think that would enhance the POV. A faster SS would have totally nailed this, but very nice as is.

Will

Hi Adi, nicely detailed image. I really like the sheeting water you have captured and the complimentary colors of the background. Amazed at your shutter speed, I guess you wanted to keep the ISO reasonable. Thank you for sharing.

Nice head angle and I love the sheen over the bill. A shame you couldn't get right down to eye level but thats the case sometimes. Yo got a good result here, but I think you'll get more keepers with a faster shutter speed in the future

Mike

Thanks all for the comments. Regarding the shutter speed, prior to shooting this image, I was photographing a Great Crested Grebe that was in a much darker area of the pond. When I saw this duck approach me, I shot a couple of frames without changing any of the settings (I was on auto-ISO). The RAW file is very sharp with no motion blur - the LR screenshot uploaded here is highly compressed to fit within the 600 KB file limit. In hindsight though, I agree that a faster shutter speed and a smaller aperture would've probably been ideal in this situation.

The IQ is great and I agree with Mike about the perfect HA and the sheen.
The image is tack sharp so I have no issue with your shutter speed.F8 was fine.
I think the image needs a little bit of CCW rotation but that could be due to optical illusion.
Nice pic of this female scaup.
Gail

Looks sharp to me. Details look very nice. The light is what it is.