Mallards in a Snow Covered Field

After seeing hundreds of mallards feed in the field very close to my house for a couple afternoons, I decided to put the snow cover on the Power Hunter blind and get out in the action with the camera. Unfortunately, the majority of the mallards were already out feeding in a different field but I was able to get one flock in the decoys to snap off a few images. I had high hopes of getting geese in the decoys too but they had something else in mind that afternoon.

I put out a few duck decoys and a robo along with my goose decoys to bring the mallards in front of the camera. Shooting from the blind, I used the D90 with the 70-300mm lense. Since the sun was still up, my shutter speeds were high enough to turn off the VR on the lense allowing for quicker focus.  I kept the aperture at f7.1 and shot in RAW. Once the ducks started to work, I started clicking the shutter trying to keep the ducks in the viewfinder. I had forgotten how quick a tornado can start when it comes to mallards in a corn field.

I changed the white balance to direct sunlight and the picture control to nature-landscape once I had the files in ViewNX. A monochrome picture control was used on one of the images that I felt benefited the different look of black and white. After changing the files to Tiff’s, PSE8 was used to clone out unwanted background objects. Levels and hue/saturation layer masks were used to tweak the colors the final amount and the high pass sharpen filter was used to sharpen the images.

Laying out in the corn field with ducks all around me had me thinking of next year’s duck season already but before that, I get to chase snow geese and gobblers.

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