I Must Be Quackers!

DV3E7683, originally uploaded by andyskelton-a Blog a day http://andrewskelton.net.

What a fantastic day, and when first setting out to football – I didn’t have much hope that the weather would open out, but open out it did.

I managed the usual number of shots at football but with the overcast sky, the photos were nothing special. When it came to the team presentation I decided to try the blue graduated filter to see if I could put some colour into the sky. I’m mightily impressed that it did just that adding a blue hue to the clouds and if you didn’t know you would swear that the sky had been blue.

Straight after football we hot-footed it down to Barnes where we were meeting some of our close friends who were staying locally. The weather was now looking more promising but I left my camera in it’s bag until mid afternoon when the sun, and lighting was so good I couldn’t resist it making an appearance.

I’ve photographed the birds at Barnes numerous times but I don’t get bored of snapping away, far from it, and with results like this it’s not hard to see why (if that isn’t too conceited?). This male Mallard was resting on a wooden handrail around the Mandarin Duck enclosure. Not looking his best, being between molts, his iridescent plumage was still magnificent. He kept an eye on us at all time but was generally unperturbed by our close proximity to him; a relaxed subject is always easy to work with, whether animal, vegetable or mineral!

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