PHOTOGRAPHY BLOG

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.

It’s very important to know your camera. Read the manual, then get out your camera and try a few things, then read the manual again, and again, and AGAIN. Try keeping your camera and the manual on you lap while watching TV, reading and experimenting, and taking shots of the your surroundings even the TV.

Simplify your photo as much as possible, remove unwated elements and be aware of the background. A photo with too much going on wont grab the viewers attention and keep it. If the eye wanders around the picture trying to look at all the elements that are there, it will loose its effectiveness. Make sure your subject is the most prominate feature of the photo and the background is not distracting.

See articles Know Your Equipment and Better Composition.

Here is a non-official way (do-it-yourself-at-home) on the forum to map out dead pixels on Canon EOS 5D.

Make a shot with lens cap on at eg. 1/5 seconds and 1600 ISO with auto-focus off (or turn off noise reduction in CF and make shutter open for longer). After that go to Sensor Cleaning and turn it on (as cleaning the CMOS when mirror is up and shutter is open, but leave lens on) for a minute. Yes, it should be long enough. After that, switch camera off, then - on and - YOUR DEAD PIXELS ARE GONE!

Have you tried that?