A WINTER ICE SHOW When looking for interesting and striking wildlife shots, it's often the familiar subjects that provide the best opportunities. With this in mind I decided to spend some time at my local park over the winter months. With a good sized lake and a greedy population of ducks and geese, the cold winter days would hopefully provide some worthwhile shots. I decided that the best shots would be those where the lake was completely frozen over and so I only visited the lake on days where the temperature had been below zero the previous night. Anything from minus two and beyond made it almost certain. My equipment was fairly reduced for this project - I needed just a long lens, a few rolls of film and a large beanbag... plus some grain to grab their attention! Being able to get down to the edge of the water was ideal: I could get perfect low-level images and produce much better backgrounds. |
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| Male and Female Mallards - taken on a tributary to the main lake. The opposite bank provided a lovely colour that reflected in the ice. Strong light also helps to make those plumage colours really sing... | |
| Although I was reasonably happy with the portraits, I wanted something less static. With the lake completely frozen, I knew that the ducks would struggle to walk on the slippery surface - particularly when rushing towards a handful of grain. The images below show my attempts at capturing the action as they lost their footing... | |
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| Ducks that try to take off or land are ideal subjects as they're almost bound to lose their footing. It seems a bit mean really... following a duck and just hoping that it falls over!! The pictures below were part of a sequence, taken using the camera's maximum speed of 5 frames per second. I used autofocus in servo mode to track the coot from the moment it first tried to take off. | |
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| Paul Miguel | |