Blue Spectrum of Feathers on Mallards

Even with the duck season being over for a few months, I got access to a wing from a big drake mallard and took advantage of it by taking close up photographs. For waterfowl hunters, the blue spectrum on the wings of mallards ranks up there second only to the green of the drake’s head.

For this shooting session, I was in my basement with the lights off and the D90 mounted on my Slik tripod to make sure I could get the sharpest image possible. To be able to focus closer on the wing, I put a 20mm extension tube on the 18-105mm. Camera settings included an aperture of f11, f13 or f36, ISO 200, RAW format and self timer. The VR was turned off on the lense and I focused manual using the live view feature on the D90. To light the wing tip, I handheld the SB-700 SpeedLight at different angles along with changing the flash power output from 1/1 to 1/64.

Once in ViewNX, I made adjustments to the RAW files by adjusting the following: white balance, picture control and highlight/shadows. I changed the white balance to direct sunlight while the picture control was adjusted to the custom nature/landscape. To help control the whites and the blacks, I adjusted the highlight and shadow sliders if necessary.

I also created HDR images with some of the images so when doing that, I created five different exposed images by ranging the exposure compensation on the RAW files from -1.5 to 1.5. I then outputted those files into 16 bit Tiff’s and worked on them in EasyHDR 2.0. I used the standard settings of black and white, night and dramatic in their drop down list of effects.

The final step was using PhotoShop Elments 11 to crop, sharpen and enhance the images using special effects. I used layer masks and the brush tool to create new images by brushing out the areas that I wanted to be seen through the background image. With the water droplets, I used a small brush tool to allow the blue of the mallard wings to shine through the rest of the wing which was black and white; It took me roughly an hour to brush out all the droplets. I also used the VirtualPhotographer plugin to change the black and white images into a world war II type b/w. Lastly, I duplicated the main layer for the image and sharpened that layer using the high pass sharpen filter and changed the blend mode to overlay and adjusted the opacity to around 20%.

Up next I hope will be scenes from snow goose hunting and I hopefully will be testing out a new Nikon lense. I’ve sent my Sigma 50-150 in on a trade and looking at a Nikon 24-120 f4 instead. When reviewing the lenses, the new Nikon D7100 body was announced which made me think about spending money on a new body too. But I then looked at the specs and the RAW buffer size on the D7100 is alittle slow for me shooting RAW all the time. I'll await the hopefully release of a D300s replacement in the coming months or years.

 

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#10. HDR Processed.

#11. Cross between HDR b/w & HDR color with layer mask.

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#17. HDR B/W Processed with Layer Mask for water droplets.

#18. WWII B/W from Virtual Photographer with Layer Mask for water droplets.

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#22. Cross between b/w and color processing with layer mask for water droplets & call.