Nature: Duck patterns

There’s a fair amount of wildlife around me. I have a number of squirrel and deer photos, but I’ll probably never post them. They’re kinda blah to me, there’s nothing interesting about them outside the fact that a snapped a photo of an animal. If it’s something rare, that can be kinda cool. But there are a gazillion pics of deer and squirrels out there and other common fauna.

The same could be said for ducks–there are a gazillion duck photos. How cute! A duck. Next photo, please.

So I thought I’d try to do something interesting with one of my duck photos. In this case, I noticed the pattern of the duck’s feathers echoed the patterns of the ripples in the stream, so I wanted to emphasize that and maybe make a better photo. I did that by making the image a high-contrast black and white, and reframing the image so it created more of a balance between the water and the duck.

In this finished photo, the duck is less important and prominent, now, and the patterns brought out by the b&w are more the focus of the image.