Ring-necked duck

[P-A. Fortin]

[First image posted out of the confort of ETL ]

Taken during a very short trip (5 hours) to Santee Lakes, CA last December. I had only 7 shots left on my card when I saw this male diving in and out not too far. I knew it was just a matter of time before he would flap its wings, so I layed down on the ground and waited. And waiting I did: it took at least over 10 minutes before I got what I was waiting for. I had my elbows in pebbles, bleeding a bit, and I was pretty sure that Murphy's Law would strike again and that the bird would probably indeed flap its wings, at a bad angle and 100ft away from where I was.

For once I'm glad I was wrong. Plus thanks to this image, I really discovered the benefits of lying on the ground. Definitely painful, definitely worth it.

Canon 60D, 100-400L @ 400mm, ISO 500, 1/2000, f/5.6, manual, handheld, no flash. Cropped at about 70% for composition (the bird was way too centered in the original image).

Added a bit of saturation in LR. NR and sharpening in CS5.

[dankearl]

Very nice Wing flap in golden light.
And yes, laying on the ground is a must!

[Randy Stout]

P-A.

Welcome to the 'big' board. You will find we are a nice group here too, perhaps not quite as gentle as the ETL folks, but still pretty nice!

I like your colors, flap, image composition. The image quality has suffered a bit from the crop.

Getting low often improves the image impact. Sometimes you have BG issues, or it can degrade the reflection, but overall, it is the way to go.

Look forward to more!

Cheers

Randy

[Daniel Cadieux]

P-A...nice to see you here! Lovely wingflap for sure, in a perfect worls the wing to our right would have been opened up more at the tip, but hey nothing wrong as is too. You got the exposure right...and good call getting low.

[P-A. Fortin]

Thanks all for the comments.

Randy: I don't mind the "not as gentle" at all. If I post images here (and hopefully I will have more worth it in the future), it is so that people can tell me what could/should be improved in these images. That's how I'll learn and improve. If what I needed was an ego boost based on random people telling me "how nice my images are", I know plenty of other places to get such "feedback"! But that is definitely not what I am looking for.

[Richard Stern]

Hi,

I love this, perhaps with the exception of the angle of the bird's left wing as already mentioned. The bird is sharp and bright, the bg is good, and I like the area of blue water. I think boosting the sat was a good idea.

Richard