- Post score: 51
- #1
This Lesser Violetear was captured in the cloud forests of Costa Rica. There are a lot of feeding stations in the area and this one happened to have an incredibly colorful bush with orange flowers behind it. You just couldn’t ask for a better backdrop! The hummer was checking us out and hovering with his face towards the camera. The trick here is using a small AF area and doing everything you can to keep the AF area on the head. I often use Single point or D9 on the D5/6 for this kind of work.
You can actually have some fun with shutter speeds here. The thing is, the shutter speed is more about wing blur than stopping the bird's motion when they hover (unless you drop to less than 1/500 or so, then it gets tricker). For this one, I was trying to freeze the wing enough to see some rough detail but still show little blur - so 1/2000th worked well. The thing is, you never know what poses they’re gonna give you as you fire away, so what I do is use at various shutter speeds during the shoot so I have a nice selection of images with different amounts “wing blur”. Nikon D5, 600mm, 1/2000th, F/5.6, ISO 9000 (the D5 handles those high ISOs with ease if you fill the frame).
You can actually have some fun with shutter speeds here. The thing is, the shutter speed is more about wing blur than stopping the bird's motion when they hover (unless you drop to less than 1/500 or so, then it gets tricker). For this one, I was trying to freeze the wing enough to see some rough detail but still show little blur - so 1/2000th worked well. The thing is, you never know what poses they’re gonna give you as you fire away, so what I do is use at various shutter speeds during the shoot so I have a nice selection of images with different amounts “wing blur”. Nikon D5, 600mm, 1/2000th, F/5.6, ISO 9000 (the D5 handles those high ISOs with ease if you fill the frame).
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