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Photographing hummingbirds
PhotofocusMy wife has been feeding the hummingbirds for many years. We have some year-rounders and we get a plethora of visitors during spring and fall migrations. If you want some tips on getting a hummingbird feeding station in place, here’s an article with tips from my wife Holly. The feeder set-up The feeder is on the corner of a house and receives easy morning sun. Because of its location, this is a very active feeder at this time of year. The thing I really like is that there are many different background possibilities. There are different trees, some in sun, some in shade. All images were made with minimal camera movement of about one foot in any direction. Gear Using a long lens with the OM 1 (link to the OM 1 Mark II) camera made it easy to fill the frame with the tiny birds. I used a 150-600mm f/5-6.3 OM System lens and an M.Zuiko 1.4 teleconverter that has the equivalent field of view as a 1680mm Full Frame camera. That’s a lot of reach, giving the hummers plenty of space. Camera was mounted on a FotoPro Tripod with gimbal head for great support and easy following of the birds. Settings Using full sun on this shoot I set the camera for bird tracking and back button focus. Shutter Priority with a shutter speed of 1/2500th sec. Floating ISO with an override of exposure compensation. I’ll probably chase the hummers again tomorrow and try a little faster shutter speed. The image of the black chin hummingbird below has different settings with a higher shutter speed which pushes up the ISO as well. A little bit of noise reduction cleans up the background nicely. Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
