Hooded Merganser, Viera Wetlands, Viera Florida

The Hooded Merganser is my favorite duck. Not only is it elegant and beautiful, but I don’t get to see it that often, and it is incredibly difficult to photograph well. That, for some maybe slightly perverse reason, makes it my favorite 🙂 Camera exposure systems have gotten very sophisticated…with built in Dynamic Range Optimization (or whatever your maker chooses to call it) that reads the brights and darks in a scene or subject and automatically compensates for excesses in processing. This shot, thanks to the camera, not to me, is almost perfectly exposed. Detail in the back, and detail in the white. Impressive for a machine.

It was also taken, hand-held, at just shy of 4000mm equivalent field of view. That is an impossible magnification for any camera but the Nikon P900, with its excellent lens, excellent image stabilization, and excellent Perfect Image zoom digital enhancement to reach. 1/640th @ ISO 100 @ f6.5. Processed in Lightroom.