While focused on the cranes in the sunset-lit water (as illustrated in my previous post) this drake flew by and I was fortunate to be able to lock down on him.

New Mexico.

Tags:   Northern Shoveler sunset Bosque del Apache 12/15/2019

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Wood Duck drake displaying. Rio Grande Nature Center State Park. Albuquerque NM. This is a nice spot to photograph wintering ducks with some built in blinds but the ducks can be a ways away.

Tags:   Wood Duck Wood Duck displaying Rio Grande Nature Center State Park New Mexico drake

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When I go to the Bosque del Apache NWR in NM for wintering cranes, and snow geese I stay in Socorro. At nearby New Mexico Tech there is a pond that is usually good for some wintering ducks at close range that are fairly tame. Last winter there were a number of American Wigeons and R1ng-necked Ducks there.
There are similar ponds/small lakes across the country where wintering ducks are more approachable for photography. Another example is Reid Park in Tucson, AZ. I think of these locations as minature Magee Marshes (spring warbler Mecca) for ducks. If you want to get an opportunity for fantastic duck images than I would recommend my friend Brian Zwiebel who goes into the cold water with decoys and waders. I need to join him for that sometime-was hoping to do that last Spring and then the pandemic came.

Tags:   American Wigeon winter drake duck ducks New Mexico Socorro 12/13/2019

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Florida from almost two years ago. These wintering ducks were in a salt water bay in the Tampa area.

Tags:   Redhead Redheads Florida winter Redhead pair

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I've long wanted a better opportunity to photograph this attractive drake in breeding plumage.
There was seemingly a Bufflehead convention at St Marks NWR when I was there earlier this month. I've been there previously and seen many females in the dikes but the males if seen tended to be offshore in the gulf some distance away. This year there were multiple males swimming with the females in the dikes and many were close to the road as well. I played a bit with the exposure compensation, and it seemed better to me to use slight positive exposure compensation to bring out those vibrant colors on the head, but that ended up blowing out the whites a bit. In retrospect bracketing exposure compensation may have been a good way to approach this subject given the plentiful opportunities. That would have allowed using layers in photoshop to replace the whites, thus showing greater detail of the whites.

Tags:   St Marks NWR Bufflehead Bufflehead magic exposure compensation bracketing 1/6/2019 drake

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