{"id":107004,"date":"2022-02-02T05:54:08","date_gmt":"2022-02-02T12:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=107004"},"modified":"2022-02-02T08:16:50","modified_gmt":"2022-02-02T15:16:50","slug":"goldeneye-reflections-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/02\/goldeneye-reflections-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Goldeneye Reflections Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just short of three weeks ago I posted “Goldeneye Reflections Part I” so Part II is more than a little late making an appearance.<\/p>\n

I feel pretty confident that today’s post will be too much of a good thing for some of my viewers because it contains 15 photos that are very similar to each other with only bare bones narration. So prepare for some overkill. But personally I’m fascinated by the variations in bird reflections when conditions are right to produce interesting ones and conditions were just about perfect at a local pond 23 days ago.<\/p>\n

Hopefully at least some of my readers will share my interest in these reflection variations. And there’s a lot of them, almost certainly too many.<\/p>\n

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While I was walking the pond edge this drake Common Goldeneye found himself boxed in in a small cove which made him slightly uncomfortable with me so close. So with calm determination he began swimming toward the open pond. Which meant that he had to swim by me – either that or take off or dive and swim away from me underwater. Thankfully he chose the first option.<\/p>\n

That morning conditions were just right for interesting and constantly changing reflections. The sky was blue and clear and there was a hint of a breeze – just enough to produce slight ripples in the water that resulted in continuously changing reflections. But not so much as to distort them beyond all recognition.<\/p>\n

All of these photos are presented in the order they were taken with no skips, not necessarily in bursts but quickly, one after the other.<\/p>\n

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I tried to time my photos at a moderate speed, not as quick as bursts but slow enough to have significant reflection changes from shot to shot.- probably averaging about 1\/2 second between them.<\/p>\n

Here I like the upside down and isolated air foil shaped reflection of part of his head that includes an eye.<\/p>\n

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The photos and constantly changing reflections mostly speak for themselves so I won’t be saying much.<\/p>\n

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He turned his head toward me only once, and only for a moment.<\/p>\n

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You can get a sense of how fast he was swimming and how quickly I was taking photos by following the small, out of focus dark spot on the water at upper right from this shot to…<\/p>\n

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the next one.<\/p>\n

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A “triple header”, a quadruple header if you include his real one. Based on the position of the dark spot I waited longer to take this shot.<\/p>\n

With diving ducks, whose heads and bills are usually wet, specular highlights (those wet and shiny reflections on their bills and face) are an annoyance but…<\/p>\n

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they typically disappear when the bird turns its head to another angle.<\/p>\n

Here he was looking away from me for two photos, in this one with all four of his visible “eyes”.<\/p>\n

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There’s another dark spot on the water, this time behind his head reflection, that can be followed from…<\/p>\n

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photo to photo as in indication of swimming speed and how fast I was taking photos.<\/p>\n

Here we see portions of five head reflections.<\/p>\n

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The dark “floater” on the water is about to be left behind.<\/p>\n

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The bits of goldish-brown we see reflected in the water are almost certainly caused by phragmites on the far shore.<\/p>\n

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We’re almost done. Promise.<\/p>\n

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Here’s the last one. I could include more but I’ve already beaten a dead horse.\u00a0My excuse for posting so many of these reflection photos is that I don’t get to shoot in these conditions all that often so I just decided to go for the gusto.<\/p>\n

It’s a persistent character flaw. As my dear old mother used to say with all the sincerity she could muster, “Ronnie, sometimes you just don’t know when to quit.”<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Just short of three weeks ago I posted “Goldeneye Reflections Part I” so Part II is more than a little late making an appearance.\u00a0 (15 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":107014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,376],"tags":[2847,91,2809,211,6163,4628,311],"class_list":["post-107004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-common-goldeneyes","tag-bucephala-clangula","tag-common-goldeneye","tag-drake","tag-male","tag-reflection-variations","tag-specular-highlights","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/common-goldeneye-7632-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-rPS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107004"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107068,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107004\/revisions\/107068"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}