Male bufflehead duck beginning a dive at Budd Inlet on South Puget Sound
Olympia, WA
December 21, 2016
The photo above looks deceptively simple at first glance. The distinctive white male bufflehead is a familiar sight for anyone who has hung around the water in Western Washington in the Winter. Hang around for a minute or two and you are sure to see one of their acrobatic dives into the deep where they forage for food.
What is unique about the photo is catching the duck in mid-dive, before his bill breaks the surface of the water.
It takes less than 1 second from the beginning of the dive until all that is left is the splash.
Here is an animated image which contains a sequence of 6 frames of a male bufflehead diving. I have slowed it down to 1/5th the original speed, so 6/10 of a second is expanded to 3 seconds. You can see that I only managed two frames before the duck's head disappears below the surface.
The keys to capturing the desired precise moment are twofold; first, own a camera capable of at least 7 frames per second shooting, so you will have 1-3 frames during the dive. I waited a long time for Canon's 7D Mark ii to arrive on the scene with it's 10 frames per second. Some of the new mirrorless cameras can shoot over 20 frames in a second. The second factor is being able to anticipate when the duck is going to dive. This takes many hours of watching and studying the duck's behavior to see what signal it might give. In the case of most diving ducks, they change the shape of their neck right before they dive. If you can spot this change, you can press the shutter just as the duck is beginning to dive. It also takes a good deal of practice to get the photographer's eye and hand synchronized.
Here is the same dive as above, at real speed. You can still see the individual frames, but much harder to separate the action from the fluid motion of the dive.
