This article shares a selection of handheld images captured a few day ago of ducks flying during a snowfall at Grimsby harbour. As regular readers know I enjoy pushing my camera gear from time to time just to see what will happen.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

Even though I’ve been using my Olympus camera gear for over two and a half years, I’m still not completely used to the fact that I don’t have to care about the weather. Other than one zoom lens, all of my other M.Zuiko lenses have an IPX-1 rating. My E-M1X bodies have been tested to IPX-3 conditions… although OM Systems only certifies the camera body to IPX-1. Suffice to say my Olympus gear can handle very harsh conditions and a lot of water/moisture falling on it.

After breakfast a few days ago I checked the weather forecast. It called for cold and blustery conditions, under overcast skies with the likelihood of snow. Not ideal conditions to do any bird-in-flight photography. It did strike me as very good conditions to attempt some test images. So I grabbed some gear and headed out to Grimsby harbour to see if I could photograph some ducks flying in a snowfall.

When I first arrived at the harbour I was greeted with light snowfall. I used my C1 Custom Mode setting on my E-M1X which incorporates Bird Detection AI Subject Tracking in combination with Pro Capture L. I had my Pre-Shutter Frames set to 10, and my Frame Limited turned off. I shot in Manual mode using a single AF point as is my standard practice.

Since the harbour is completely frozen over the ducks feed further out and fly back in to congregate along the snow and ice packed shoreline. This creates very good conditions to capture ducks in flight. As the ducks cycled back and forth I captured a range of images. It was so cold and blustery with the wind whipping in off Lake Ontario that I retreated to the car 3 times to get some feeling back in my fingers. Luckily my car has a heat steering wheel!

Sometimes the ducks would fly back to the harbour area in groups so I had to choose a duck in mid-air on which to focus, then lock in on it as it approached. On occasion I followed the incoming duck right into its landing spot.

This was a good test to see how well Bird Detection AI Subject Tracking with Pro Capture L would hold focus. As I had discovered in earlier test photo sessions with gulls, as long as I used proper technique I had no issues with my E-M1X holding focus. The next three consecutive images are from one of the opportunities when a group of ducks was flying in.

I changed my position along the shoreline a number of times in order to get varying backgrounds and shooting angles, and used a short stool to capture lower angle photographs.

On a few occasions I didn’t notice an incoming duck until it was almost on top of me. In these instances all I had time to do was wheel around and shoot. Even though this was far from proper technique my E-M1X was still able to capture some interesting images.  The duck illustrated above was only 11.4 metres away and flying between two large trees.

As the sky darkened I was able to isolate some incoming ducks against a monochromatic background. When shooting from my stool I was able to capture lower angle images with out-of-focus rocks, trees and piles of ice in the background. Some sample images follow.

The snow conditions varied, as did the lighting depending on the changing density of the cloud cover. I did some slight experimentation with shutter speeds and exposure compensation… both within fairly tight parameters.

As the snowfall became heavier I knew that my experiment was drawing to a close as birds will take cover or hunker down in these conditions. The heavier snowfall resulted in some of my favourite images from that day’s photo session.

One approaching female mallard in particular yielded a nice array of ‘flying during a snowfall’ photographs as we can see in the final eight photographs in this article. I really love how the snowfall in these images capture the environmental conditions that these ducks are exposed to during the winter months.

As anticipated all of the ducks very quickly hunkered down as the snowfall intensified. I was ready to head home and thaw out after a successful image test session.

Technical Note:

Photographs were captured handheld using camera gear as noted in the EXIF data. Images were produced from RAW files using my standard process.  Crops are noted. This is the 1,124 article published on this website since its original inception in 2015.

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