![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/common-goldeneye-7891b-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"common-goldeneye-7891b-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nReflections are unpredictable and often a great deal of fun if, like this photographer, you’re easily entertained.<\/p>\n
Yesterday morning was cold, bright and beautiful – an ideal opportunity for photographing birds. But I was restricted to locations fairly close to home so I could accommodate a service technician who was scheduled to repair my brand new, but defective, gas kitchen range (yes, lately I’ve been keeping the local repair industry employed all by myself).<\/p>\n
I chose a location that would require me to hoof it to a spot where I’d have a good morning light angle and shoot from my tripod. It was damn cold (21\u00b0 F.) for this wuss to be out in the elements with a bare shooting hand and big ears that act like heat radiators but I bundled up and toughed it out and I’m glad I did. Thankfully there was no breeze to make me even colder and ripple the water so its surface was perfectly undisturbed and mirror-like.<\/p>\n
So I had 75 minutes of shooting birds and their gorgeous and often bizarre reflections, which entertained me to no end. The photo below is just one example.<\/p>\n
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1\/6400, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n I arrived at my frigid location soon after sunrise and I was standing at a spot that gave me a low shooting angle which only enhanced the reflections. So when this immature male (not an adult male like I said in my title) Common Goldeneye unexpectedly swam by very close to me I really gave my camera a workout so I could capture as many varying and interesting reflections as possible. I got a lot of strange ones but this initially ‘normal-looking’ reflection gave me pause.<\/p>\n Just look at the size of his reflected head. The shape of his head is relatively undisturbed but its size has been magnified to the point that it looks huge, at least to my eye. I don’t quite understand the physics or optics of it but I suspect the effect is a result of the unusually large bow wave directly in front of him, combined of course with the mirror-like surface of the water.<\/p>\n I got lots of bizarre reflections yesterday and you’re likely to see some of them in the near future. But I wouldn’t classify this one as bizarre because its shape is pretty normal.<\/p>\n This one is just strange because of size distortion which I thought was unusual and interesting enough to share.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Note for photographers: <\/em><\/p>\n One of my reasons for shooting outside in the cold yesterday was to test one of the possible causes of the very high number of soft shots I’ve been getting lately when it’s cold. I strongly suspected the soft shots were caused by some kind of heat wave distortion but that could come from atmospheric heat waves further away from my lens or the temperature disparity between my warm lens inside my pickup interacting with the cold air when I stuck my lens out my window. So yesterday I wanted to shoot with a cold lens in the cold air to see if I could narrow it down.<\/em><\/p>\n The result: Nearly all of my shots yesterday morning were tack sharp which tells me that my problem is caused by my warm lens interacting with the cold air and not by heat waves further away.\u00a0<\/em>Now I’ve gotta figure out how to keep my lens colder inside my pickup. Either that or decide if I’m willing to freeze my patootie off with the heater turned off for 3-4 hours. <\/em><\/p>\n