How To Photograph Hummingbirds
Hummingbird photography is addictive!! Stimulates your creativity, not only challenges you but takes you to great places, and hopefully rewards you with some great pics. Almost everyone likes Hummingbirds. They’re so small and fast moving, it’s hard to get a good look at them. When you show pictures of hummingbirds, people are impressed, because they can see all of the wonderful details. I thought it would be great to share how best to try and set up for hummingbirds so you can produce results you can be happy with.
So what does it take to capture a hummingbird in flight in detail? First and foremost HUMMINGBIRDS , mainly patience, and a little setup and lastly a feeder to attract them.
GEAR- any camera, lenses will depend on the working distance your birds will allow you, norm 8-10 ft, normally anywhere from 200-400mm. Dont need fast glass, ie. f2.8 as you are stopping down your glass from f-8 to f13 depending on exposure. I use my 300mm + 1.4TC on a tripod with gimbal head.
Flashes- Hummingbirds wings can beat up to 80 times per second, this produces their signature hum. To the naked eye and you camera—the wings are just a blur. One of the first questions I’m asked is what shutter speed I use to stop this super-fast movement. The real answer is that the motion is frozen with high speed electronic flash, not by a fast shutter speed on the camera….. full article.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:19 am
I noticed that you refer to having hummingbird feeders. Do you ever go out into nature to photograph hummingbirds? It seems like it would be harder to capture them with the same brightness as you do with set up lighting and flash.