Target Practice

[dankearl]

I have spent the last two afternoons deleting photos of OOF birds in flight at the local duck pond.
A fairly large pond with easy access and people are always feeding the ducks from each end and so they are
always flying between. Determined to get better at flight photography and shooting ducks is great practice, they fly fast and
make Hawks seem easy.
It is actually a lot of fun!
A Wigeon against a varied BG in poor light with High ISO.
When the D800 came out, early reviews were not favorable about the AF, but I disagree.
I cloned out the head of another duck in the BG.

1/3200, f5.6, ISO 2500, 500mm (300 w/ 1.7tc), D800, HH

DSC_3938bpn.jpg

[Nick Palmieri]

Nice capture. Great BG. The whites look a little hot on my monitor. Like the crop as presented.

[Don Nelson]

Nicely cropped and good down wing position.
Whites are too hot to recover anything in the posted JPG -- Dan, you might want to go back to the RAW and reprocess for white detail if it is there.

[David Salem]

Nice looking drake widgeon. Perfect wings down pose with a good HA. Whites noted but Imagine if you had some real light on this shot. I love shooting waterfowl and yes they are good practice and very challenging. Well done Dan

[Frank Schauf]

A great dynamic image, congratulations.

[Jim Crosswell]

I like the wing postion, sharpness and composition. Whites already mentioned. Look forward to seeing more. Well done Dan!

[Miguel Palaviccini]

Great target practice! I agree that the whites are blown out, maybe you can recover them in ACR?

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Dan, looks like your practise is paying off, not that you needed any, looking at your RTH images. Excellent flying posture with the downstroke of the wings. I like the varied colours on this species, and the BG looks great too. Maybe a little off the top.

[arash_hazeghi]

cool wing position and BG. nice sharp details, I wish for more detail in both whites and blacks.

[Jon Swanson]

Wing position, BG, and bird are excellent. I have never shot with the D800 at that ISO and will have to give it a whirl to see how the noise holds up. I agree with the lack of details in the darks and the whites are blown. Perhaps a little more work in PS can extract them?