{"id":150884,"date":"2024-01-21T05:51:07","date_gmt":"2024-01-21T12:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=150884"},"modified":"2024-01-21T06:43:20","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T13:43:20","slug":"diving-redhead-a-nine-image-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/21\/diving-redhead-a-nine-image-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Diving Redhead – A Nine Image Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

Six days ago, while I was attempting to photograph rambunctious coots out in the middle of a pond, a drake Redhead came in right in front of me while he was repeatedly diving for food. I’ve posted photos of diving Redheads before but this guy was broadside to me in good light, he was close, I had a pretty low angle on him and I liked how the series of photos turned out so I decided to share them.<\/p>\n

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When photographing diving ducks you have to be quick on the trigger or you’ll miss the early stages of the dive. It helps if you’re familiar enough with their behavior to recognize the cues they give you of an imminent dive.<\/p>\n

Many ducks pull their heads backward before diving but Redheads assume this blank stare forward just before they…<\/p>\n

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stretch their head and neck straight up. When I see the stare and neck stretch I know it’s time to fire off a burst.<\/p>\n

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Then they throw their head forward and…<\/p>\n

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down while they’re pushing their body forward with their webbed feet. In this shot we can’t see his feet but we see the “water well” beginning to form behind him that was caused by his feet pushing his body forward.<\/p>\n

The composition of the rest of the shots in this series becomes increasingly wonky because when ducks are diving I always like to include the water well\/water splash behind the bird.<\/p>\n

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The body of Redheads forms an arch as their heads enter the water. With some diving species the arch isn’t as exaggerated.<\/p>\n

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We get a look at his legs and feet for only an instant.<\/p>\n

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Surface tension and vacuum suck up a lot of water behind the bird.<\/p>\n

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At this point he’s going almost straight down.<\/p>\n

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Gone. It might seem a little silly to include a photo with no part of a bird clearly visible but I like to see the developing effects of the dive on the water to the very end.<\/p>\n

Diving ducks are quite a ballet of the coordinated motion required to get such buoyant birds underwater and keep them there. When conditions are right and I have the opportunity, I’ll always attempt to photograph the process.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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PS – It happened again.<\/em><\/p>\n

In yesterday’s post<\/a><\/span><\/span> I said it’s extremely “rare” for one of my photos, where the bird is fairly large in the frame, to have the position of the bird’s eye conform exactly to the “rule of thirds”.<\/em><\/p>\n

But while I was processing photo #3 above I noticed that.<\/em>..<\/p>\n

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it happened again. The duck’s yellow eye is exactly at the intersection of two of the lines of the 3 x 3 grid of the rule of thirds. And I didn’t even try to place it there while I was cropping the photo. That’s just how it turned out.<\/em><\/p>\n

I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t happen again for the rest of the year. Or longer.<\/em><\/p>\n

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And a surprising coincidence.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150889,"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":[6,334,392,1243],"tags":[1244,3420,6800,7304,4484,7305],"class_list":["post-150884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-redhead-waterfowl","tag-aythya-americana","tag-coincidence","tag-diving-for-food","tag-drake-redhead-duck","tag-rule-of-thirds","tag-surface-tension"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/redhead-9785-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-DfC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150884","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=150884"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150958,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150884\/revisions\/150958"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}