Mallard splash down

My kind of image!!!

Very nice, colors are great as is the motion...great reflex too as these guys sometimes come screaming in at velocity....

Cheers,

Super nice!! I love the spray of water from the skiing feet.

Great shot - the reflection really sets this one off. Perfect timing, too.

Sharp as a tack where it counts. That eye focus is impressive, Cliff. It's amazing how you do that with your glasses on (I think).

Razor sharp Cliff. wish there was a little more room in front of the bird. Great shot.

Great action, Cliff.
Looks like the eye-control focus worked out well on this one.

- Paul

Nice catch, Cliff. This breaks the old "leave space for the bird to fly/look/move into" rule, but it really works. I think having the bird forward in the frame gives an idea of how fast she was moving.

Nice, but the composition feels uncomfortable. Too high in the frame and too far to the right?

Cliff:

Very nice subject so sharp, different composition is growing on me. Thanks for sharing.

Cliff,

Very nice shot. The composition took me a minute to warm up to, but now I think it works. I don't think that I would want to lose any of the trail of water by moving the mallard farther to the left of the frame.

Cliff, This actually looks cool as a pano as well with the bottom cropped off. Nice shot.

This is a great shot well captured.
FWIW, I'm with Jim on the pano crop, in fact I prefer it.

Looks like she's waterskiing - excellent timing.

Cliff
This is great but.....are you sure that you didn't clone out the tow rope in her beak? I swear she looks like she's water skiing. A perfectly timed shot.

Question: What do you mean by "Canon's eye-controlled focusing"?

LHays wrote:What do you mean by "Canon's eye-controlled focusing"?

On the EOS-3, the camera will focus where you look, as long as where you look is covered by one of the 45 AF sensors, yours is an eye that works with the system, and EC Focusing is selected and calibrated. (Calibration is done just by looking at a four illuminated sensors in both horizontal and vertical.) Many people find eye control doesn't work well for them, no matter how much they calibrate, but it works great for me, despite my eyeglasses. For most subjects other than flight, there's just no faster way to focus. But eye-control can work for flight, as my mistake here shows.

I sincerely hope Canon hasn't given up on this incredible technology, which so far has not been included on any of the high-end cameras that followed the EOS-3 (1v, 1d, 1ds). A simpler eye-controlled focusing system was built into the A2E and (I think) Elan 7, with their many fewer sensors, though I have no experience with those bodies.

Well done Cliff. I love the spray caused by the sking feet. I to would have liked room for Susie to land.