[DRwyoming]

Have had a lot of hummingbird activity lately and this male Rufous has been pretty aggressive defending the flowers in the garden and one of our feeders. I figured it was a good opportunity to play with different lenses to capture some flight portraits.

For shots like these in the yard I often shoot with a 300mm to 400mm lens from fairly close by sitting quietly and waiting for the birds to feed. If they're feeding in the garden I like to include the flowers and when they're spending more time at the feeders I generally set up for a distant background and just isolate them. We have a thick but small patch of raspberries about twenty five feet behind one hummingbird feeder which blurs out nicely but it takes a bit of effort to get the angle right with shorter focal length lenses to keep our fence and house out of the background.

Here's a capture like that shot with the 300mm PF:

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But it does take some patience and luck to have them come in that close so I swapped to the 500mm PF for more working distance at the expense of a stop of light. The extra focal length let me work from further away which seemed to bring the hummers in more often but it also made it much easier to make sure the background worked with its narrower field of view.

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It'd been a while since I shot any Auto Capture sequences so with the birds coming in so often I went the other direction and set up the Z8 and 105mm F mount macro lens on a tripod with the feeder a bit out of frame and set up auto capture based on motion criteria. That was spurred in part by some forum discussions a while back about using auto capture for this kind of work which isn't something I usually do with hummers. It took a bit of set up to keep the background clean with the shorter focal length lens.

I also cropped this one to 5:4 aspect ratio and roughly the height of a DX crop from the Z8 as I liked that composition and he was pretty close to the right side edge of the frame. I do tend to shoot looser when doing any kind of remote trigger photography like AC or with a remote release as I can't just track the subject across the frame like I can when shooting normally through the viewfinder so at least as I approach it, one tradeoff with AC is I'll tend to crop more deeply into the image unless I have a real good idea where the subject will be in the frame which is tough with flight shots. Not a big deal with the Z8's resolution but still a bit different than being able to compose the shot in the viewfinder. Here's one of the auto captured images:

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Auto Capture did a good job with focus on most of the shots but using an F mount lens I was just using motion criteria so it captured a lot of images including many of them flying out of frame and when shooting through the viewfinder I typically don't release the shutter if they're faced away from me, I can't see the eyes or things like that so with AC I ended up with an awful lot of frames I wouldn't normally capture that took a bit to cull out.

All pretty typical for flight portraits like these but fun to play with different approaches and to see what a simple AC setup could do for shots like these.

 

[Woodyg3]

Nice shots and good use of various lenses and set ups to get what you wanted. Great job.

 

[bsinc1962]

Nice ones Dave.

I tend to do roughly the same thing. 200-300mm is about right when sitting maybe 7-8 ft away. The fun with the Roufus is how loud they are when they divebomb another one that enters their territory. I haven't tried using pre-capture yet.

 

[Viathelens]

These little guys are so pretty. I recently got one at my feeders, my first Rufous shot, he was only there for a day as in my area they are simply passing through while the Anna's stay around and do not migrate far. So cute.

 

[DRwyoming]

Nice ones Dave.

I tend to do roughly the same thing. 200-300mm is about right when sitting maybe 7-8 ft away. The fun with the Roufus is how loud they are when they divebomb another one that enters their territory. I haven't tried using pre-capture yet.

Thanks Bill,

Yeah, I'm mixed on auto capture for hummers, I wanted to see if it could work when there's something they're repeatedly feeding on and it does seem to work pretty well. I might try it in some garden setups with wider lenses and floral environments.

But it also triggers on an awful lot of images where they're flying out of the frame or hovering with their faces hidden or otherwise shots I wouldn't take when looking through the viewfinder so for maybe fifty keeper shots I probably culled out five or six hundred or maybe twice that number that were sharp but not useable for a variety of reasons but mostly position in the frame or partially out of the frame or no visible head and eyes with the hummer facing away. At least those were fast and easy to cull from the grid view before even importing into LR so the set was substantially thinned before I even thought about things like critical sharpness which sped things up a lot. Of those imported almost all were in focus so that part worked well. If I get deeper into this I could set up masks and the like to reduce the number of those throwaways.

This part may seem silly but ever since my first camera I really like seeing the image come together in the viewfinder before releasing the shutter. The auto remote photo thing doesn't tick that box for me. It's cool to try to plan and execute the setup and it has potential to deliver images that might not otherwise be possible but there's nothing like looking through the viewfinder and a long lens and seeing the light, subject, pose, look, action and overall composition come together

 

[bsinc1962]

Thanks Bill,

Yeah, I'm mixed on auto capture for hummers, I wanted to see if it could work when there's something they're repeatedly feeding on and it does seem to work pretty well. I might try it in some garden setups with wider lenses and floral environments.

But it also triggers on an awful lot of images where they're flying out of the frame or hovering with their faces hidden or otherwise shots I wouldn't take when looking through the viewfinder so for maybe fifty keeper shots I probably culled out five or six hundred or maybe twice that number that were sharp but not useable for a variety of reasons but mostly position in the frame or partially out of the frame or no visible head and eyes with the hummer facing away. At least those were fast and easy to cull from the grid view before even importing into LR so the set was substantially thinned before I even thought about things like critical sharpness which sped things up a lot. Of those imported almost all were in focus so that part worked well. If I get deeper into this I could set up masks and the like to reduce the number of those throwaways.

This part may seem silly but ever since my first camera I really like seeing the image come together in the viewfinder before releasing the shutter. The auto remote photo thing doesn't tick that box for me. It's cool to try to plan and execute the setup and it has potential to deliver images that might not otherwise be possible but there's nothing like looking through the viewfinder and a long lens and seeing the light, subject, pose, look, action and overall composition come together

Last time I setup to shoot them fighting was a couple of years ago and I was still using the Z6ii so no pre-capture. Everything was through the viewfinder so for every 1000 shots I might have gotten 1 or 2 that I could work with. A lot of culling but fun to play around with.

 

[ssheipel]

Wow; the colours here are amazing. Gorgeous shots.