arriving at this simple picture of two mallard feathers required a bunch of judgment calls and some hard earned, if now familiar, scraps of knowledge. here’s what i thought about as i took the photo and then post-processed it. i think it’s a great example of how “simple” is often not simple at all. first, it has taken two years of  daily STILL images to realize that feathers don’t want to be photographed in ultra high resolution. if the individual barbs are too clear and crisp, then the whole image is compromised by a distractingly moire optical effect. the answer? shallow depth of field, with focus on on the shaft, not the the barbs.  secondly, those white tips are impossible to photograph on a white background. so, for the first time ever, i intentionally dirtied them up with a little ash so they wouldn’t get lost on the white background. i chose not to do that with the tips of the shafts, and now i am wondering if that was a mistake. thirdly, it took me at least a year of STILL to learn that a damaged feather is almost always more interesting than a perfect feather. this pairing, one perfect one imperfect, was very intentional. finally, that white background is a bear. it is the signature that holds the STILL blog collection together. but to get it, i often have to lighten/brighten an image so much that i lose the very details that caught my attention in the first place. after three years, i have no automatic tricks up my sleeve to solve this problem. every day is a new compromise. so there you have it: one “simple” picture of two mallard feathers.

mallard feathers

vadnais lake, saint paul, minnesota