We went out taking photos yesterday, and on the way back, we passed a little pond that’s on one of the streets we take. From the car I could see a great blue heron standing in the pond.. So it was exciting to have the camera in the car for this opportunity.. I got out of the car and took shots as I came closer to the pond, but Herons, are skittish birds, so it quickly moved away before I got close enough — 200mm is just not enough for skittish birds.
But as I stood on the grass next to the pond, I noticed a small flock of mallard ducks, waddling towards me. How amazing. Obviously they know the routine.. a human stands there, they come over and get fed something. Unfortunately I had no food for them, but I got a bunch of shots and a few good ones (at end of the post).
I started thinking.. Hey I could get a neat low angle video of these ducks milling around if I brought some actual duck food next time… So I looked in to what is good food for a duck and found out… ITS NOT BREAD… So it’s going to take some time to pick a duck feed for them… I’m not really looking forward to handling meal worms… but maybe cracked corn…
So this afternoon, we passed the pond again, and the resident Canada Geese flock was there… for a fleeting moment I thought I could go home and get the camera and come back for some closeup shots of the geese, but I saw the situation… There’s a flock of geese, and one individual goose off to the side with its head straight up… That one is the lookout, and I’ve learned from experience, what a wild goose chase is… That’s where you get too close to a flock and the lookout , wildly chases you around as you yell, “help! help!”
These photos were taken with my D7000, 18-200mm lens set to whatever focal length needed, F11 and 2000 ISO… So you say, ouch that’s a pretty high iso for outdoor photos, but not really, It was in the shade, that lens works really well at F11… but also given ducks are potentially moving targets, I wanted a pretty high shutter speed… So I set the camera to A mode, and turned the ISO up until I had at most 120’th of a second for speed. There was some minor grain in the photos that you could only see with magnification, but Light Room Classic’s new AI denoise works like a charm.
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