Day 338: December 4th – Black and white ducks

Foggy, mid 50s, and dead calm

A view of the Hudson?

       Today was a mixture of photographic challenges.  First of all, the lighting.  A light fog can actually help in diffusing the light making shadows less strong and in many cases photographs more pleasing.  Dense fog is another story, however.  For me, the brighter the light, the better.  This afternoon had some pretty thick soupy fog, so we started off with a challenge.  Fortunately, the fog thinned somewhat as the day went on, but it never did burn off entirely.

       The plan was to cover the “Eagle Run”, the route that Sharon and I follow down the Hudson when we go in pursuit of the wintering eagles. We knew it was too early in the winter to actually produce eagles….it’s been too warm.  You need ice up in the north country to drive the eagles down to us.  We just wanted to see if the recent storms had done any damage to our usual viewing sites.

       At Croton Station, we checked the usual “eagle trees” where we most often find roosting eagles, but as expected, we came up empty.  We did have several Buffleheads down at the bay, so I figured I’d grab a couple more shots of this quite common winter duck.  Challenge #2:  When you photograph a black and white duck, you are bound to underexpose the black parts and overexpose the white parts.  In other words, the black eye may be difficult to distinguish from the black head while the white parts may get “blown out” making it difficult to see any feather details.  You’ll see what I’m talking about in this photo.

       As I photographed the Bufflehead, a Mute swan flew overhead.  This bird is pretty much all white, so I simply underexposed it to get the best detail in the feathers and shot away.  No need to worry about underexposing the non-existent black parts.

       Our next duck was another black and white with a few more flashes and splashes of other colors like gold and chestnut to make it one of the most handsome ducks in North America.  The Hooded merganser is not a real common duck, so when I got the opportunity to get up close and photograph this bird today, I was pretty stoked.  Again, try not to overexpose the white, but keep the black from being underexposed.  All-in-all, the results here were not too bad. 

       The accompanying hen was a more muted brown….much easier to expose and get the proper colors and contrast.  Ah, if they were all that easy. 

       So, it ended up that we aborted the idea of doing the entire “Eagle Run” and concentrated on the two sites where we were getting these nice birds.  Sometimes you just have to be flexible.  Today was one of those days.