12-6-2023
During spring in my area (Michigan’s Eastern Upper Peninsula), when the ice breaks up on certain creeks, bays, coves and ponds, duck photography can be excellent for many species: Bufflehead, Hooded Merganser, Common Merganser, Wood Duck, Blue-winged Teal, Green-winged Teal, Common Goldeneye, Ring-necked Duck, American Wigeon. But Red-breasted Mergansers prefer the open rocky shorelines of peninsulas, and make excellent subjects.
Weather conditions play an important role in determining where the ducks will be. Calm sunny conditions are best, in the early morning or evening. And when this happens staying low and partially covered, with your shadow line pointing at the fight zone, is important. The ducks are looking at the sun and don’t see your movements as you pan the camera, or they pay less attention because of having to look into the sun.
Fights are rare but are explosive and oftentimes the ducks dive under water and reappear at the surface. So, acquiring focus as quickly as possible when they surface is a priority, and that is what happened above.
I prefer 1/5000 sec to stop the action, but I sometimes use 1/4000 sec and it will almost always produce sharp duck fighting images.
All of the action stays along the water so using wide zone focus (“Large Zone AF Horizontal” with the Canon R5) works excellent. Using that setting the R5 re-acquires focus on the part of the subject closest to the lens and quickly finds the eye (within 2 tenths of a sec), and stays locked on. Setting tracking sensitivity to prioritize focus acquisition is also important.
I remind clients of all of this when we go for the duck fights in the spring.
Sometimes a chase precedes a fight and panning to capture the acceleration is necessary, as above and below.
Male Common Goldeneye Chase just before attack
Above, the bird trailing latched on and the other dove under to free itself.
Male Red-breasted Mergansers Fighting
The image above demonstrates why I set up my R5 to “ignore obstacles” and encourage clients to do so – most modern DSLRs have that option.
Red-breasted Mergansers Fighting 2
In the above image a female that was already paired with a male took objection to a male displaying too close to her, and she attacked, darting into the frame as I was focused on the male. This is a rare occurrence. Most of the time the female will just swim closer to her male. By pure luck I was already on the shutter. This is a typical situation where it would usually pay to have a camera with the newer technology that allows capture of action 1/2 sec before hitting the shutter, because it is easily missed.
Male Blue-winged Teal Fighting
Rarely 2 males can have an extended fight (more than 2 secs), as above.
Before using the Canon R5 I had fights occur right in front of me, in good light, of Bufflehead, Hooded Mergansers, Pied-billed Grebes, etc. The action was always too much for the auto focus systems of the older technology, and I did not have the high ISO capability to set a high enough shutter speed anyway. That has certainly changed, and it has prompted me to take more time to try to capture fights and other action that was virtually impossible before.