Going In

One of the movements I have been trying to capture is the split second when a diving duck's bill is just breaking the water as they go in.  I thought it would be an intriguing shot, but it is very difficult to capture because there is absolutely no tip-off that they are going to dive.

I tried different strategies beginning with simply shooting a burst of images when I thought that a duck might dive.  My camera can shoot six frames in a burst, but then the buffer fills up and the camera will slow to capturing a single frame as another clears the buffer.  If the duck doesn't dive within a second or two of shooting a burst, you can blow through a lot of images very quickly — and still come up empty.  I came up empty, but with a full card.

The next strategy was to wait until the initiation of a dive but, it happens in a split second and my reaction time wasn't fast enough.  I have lots of very nice images of duck rumps disappearing beneath the surface.

Another technique I tried was to, not fire a burst, but just keep taking one frame at a time steadily, hoping I would catch one at the right moment.  That didn't work very well either.

Finally, I noticed that when they would swim in groups of three or four, they would all go down one right after the other with just a split second between each one's dive.  With this knowledge, it was just a matter of keying in on the right duck (usually the last) and shooting a burst.  In this way, hopefully one of the frames would contain the exact moment when the duck's bill broke the surface.  Notice the watery disturbance above and to the left of the bird in this photo.  That is where it's companion had just gone in.

This technique worked better than any of the others.  It turned out, however, after spending a lot of time trying to get this shot, that the split second is singularly unremarkable.  Perhaps if they went into a higher arc as they dove it would look more interesting.  Much more interesting, in my opinion, is the split second after this one.  I'll post that tomorrow.