Male Hooded Merganser
February 20th, 2022
Today was a good shooting day. We started out early for the wildlife refuge before dawn. The drawn took us through torrential rain and quite a few cars in traffic. A couple of times the car shuttered when we drove through some water on the highway. I was grateful for the weather mode in our car that handled it well. Fortunately as we got closer to the wildlife refuge the weather cleared up and I saw the partly cloudy conditions that I was expecting from my study of weather.com.
When we got into the refuge we were immediately rewarded with a male hooded merganser. He was in beautiful color and presented me with several shooting opportunities as he swam around the area nearby. I didn’t keep many of the initial shots because the lighting improved quickly from 1/500 at F8 with ISO 128,000 to 1/1250 at F8 at ISO 4000 to 5000. Excellent for this kind of photography.
I was able to sit down and rest my arms on the guard rail to get many of these shots. Wonderful to have the lower angle which makes the shots so much better. It was also nice to rest my arms on the guard rail to rest in between shooting opportunities.
The resulting images took very little formatting and only minor cropping. I was using the 1.6 crop mode on my R5 which really allowed me to get in close to the bird. The resulting images do have some noise but much better than if I had to use the 1.4x extender and the loss of a stop of light.
