{"id":98664,"date":"2021-05-26T05:09:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T11:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=98664"},"modified":"2021-05-26T05:22:22","modified_gmt":"2021-05-26T11:22:22","slug":"my-first-hummingbird-photos-of-the-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/26\/my-first-hummingbird-photos-of-the-season\/","title":{"rendered":"My First Hummingbird Photos Of The Season"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mostly female Broad-tailed Hummingbirds. I think.<\/p>\n

I’ll admit right off the top that I really struggle to reliably ID some female hummingbirds. Yesterday morning I spent a few minutes with at least two females as they were nectaring on Black Twinberry Honeysuckle in the mountains. I believe at least one of them was a Broad-tailed Hummingbird and I’m not sure about the other one so in this post I’m going to treat them generically. I welcome ID suggestions if you feel the urge to provide them.<\/p>\n

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1\/6400, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

The twinberry flowers have only appeared recently but they’re a big attraction for hummingbirds so it doesn’t take hummers long to show up after the flowers are out. Yesterday morning was the first time I’ve seen hummers at this twinberry shrub this year.<\/p>\n

I much prefer hummingbird photos taken in a natural setting so I don’t post photos of them taken at my back yard feeders. It was especially tough shooting at this location because the shooting angle was unusually difficult out my pickup window and the vegetation was so thick it was hard to get clear shots of the birds in flight. And when I did, more often than not they had their backs to me.<\/p>\n

But I got a few I liked, including this one, even though part of her right wing is hidden.<\/p>\n

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1\/6400, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Here we have a good look at the twinberry flowers that are such a draw for hummingbirds. They must be loaded with nectar, which isn’t really a surprise since they’re a type of honeysuckle.<\/p>\n

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1\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This was the only time I photographed one of the hummers perched. Perhaps she needed a rest after all that buzzing around looking for her version of orange juice for breakfast.<\/p>\n

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1\/6400, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

If this isn’t the only time it’s one of the very few times I’ve ever photographed a hummingbird with its nictitating membrane closed. There’s a catch light in her eye but it’s extremely diffused because of the effects of the membrane.<\/p>\n

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1\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + EF 1.4 III Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This may be my favorite hummingbird photo of the morning. I like her iridescence, her wing position, the excellent look at the twinberry flowers she’s feeding on and the sharpness of the image.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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A lengthy note to photographers:<\/em><\/p>\n

With hummingbird in flight photos I generally prefer little to no motion blur in the wings which requires very fast shutter speeds, usually a minimum of 1\/3200.. I shoot in aperture priority so I set my aperture and ISO and take what shutter speed I can get in the light provided at the moment. So I have to choose an ISO that gives me enough SS as the bird flies into and out of varying light conditions without setting my ISO so high that the noise in the image becomes ‘too much’, whatever that is. With hummers in flight I don’t have time to constantly fiddle-fart around with camera settings so it’s my practice to choose one combination and stick with it. I miss too many shots if I don’t.<\/em><\/p>\n

With these hummers I believe my choice of aperture and ISO was just about right. The slowest SS I got with a hummer in flight was 1\/3200 and in nearly all of my shots where the bird was sharp the wings were sharp, or sharp enough.<\/em><\/p>\n

If I’d needed a little more SS I’d have gone to f\/5.6 instead of increasing my ISO. With my camera I really try to avoid going above ISO 800 whenever possible. Your camera may handle noise better than mine does.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes I choose camera settings that work out and sometimes I don’t. This time I’m happy with my choices.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mostly female Broad-tailed Hummingbirds. I think.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,334,4082,392],"tags":[4086,2202,5771,5185,137,146,515,2203,5770,311],"class_list":["post-98664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-broad-tailed-hummingbirds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","tag-black-twinberry-honeysuckle","tag-broad-tailed-hummingbird","tag-camera-settings-for-hummingbirds-in-flight","tag-feeding-on-flowers","tag-female","tag-flight","tag-nictitating-membrane","tag-selasphorus-platycercus","tag-shutter-speed-for-hummingbirds-in-flight","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/broad-tailed-hummingbird-5394-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-pFm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}