![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/black-chinned-hummingbird-4156-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"black-chinned-hummingbird-4156-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nTwo dramatically different versions of the same photo.<\/p>\n
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1\/6400, f\/5.6, ISO 1000, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n This photo was taken two mornings ago, soon after the female Black-chinned Hummingbird landed on one of the hundreds of trumpet vine flowers on the vine growing up my brick fireplace. I like the simplicity of the image with the bird and the single, colorful flower against the dark, featureless background and nothing else.<\/p>\n But I had the option to play with it a little, so I did.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n A much looser crop of the same image reveals that she appeared to be trying to take in all the choices she had as sources of flower nectar. There are countless flower clusters like this one on the huge vine and each cluster contains at least a half dozen flowers at or near their prime. At times she seemed overwhelmed by all of her choices.<\/p>\n It’s a good thing for this photographer that she spent an inordinate amount of time at this particular cluster because it’s the only one with a clean, dark background and several of its flowers are oriented 90\u00b0 to the sun, which means I’m not getting butt shots of her while she’s feeding at them. Most of the other flowers point directly or almost directly at the sun and of course I have the sun behind me, which means I get mostly butt shots while the hummers are feeding.<\/p>\n I appreciate the flexibility the large file size (46 MP) of the Canon R5 allows me for cropping my images. With my previous cameras I wouldn’t have dared to crop as drastically as I did to get the first version of the photo above because I wouldn’t have enough pixels left for good image quality.<\/p>\n No problem with the R5.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Addendum:<\/em><\/p>\n As an afterthought I decided to actually show my readers what I tried to describe, above.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n This is my shooting situation. We can only see a portion of the 18′ tall trumpet vine – the rest of it is behind my fireplace and out of frame at bottom. The light is mottled because it filters through a tree in a neighbor’s yard and oftentimes the entire vine is in shade, so I have to get lucky with timing with both light and hummers. This is some of the best early morning light I see on the vine and it changes back and forth quickly.<\/em><\/p>\n If you’re curious, this hummer’s favorite flower cluster, the one in the first two photos and the one I prefer the hummers to feed on, is the one directly below the red “X”. The X is kind of hard to see, but it’s there.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/black-chinned-hummingbird-4156-loose-crop-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"black-chinned-hummingbird-4156-loose-crop-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/trumpet-vine-c.jpg\")
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