Hummingbird 1

This picture is one of my first attempts at capturing a hummingbird

on (digital) film. Obviously, it would be better if there was not a

shadow over the hummmingbird's head, but how significantly does that

detract from the picture? Comments are welcome.

I appreciate the lengths you must have gone to in order to get the bird even remotely in focus. What speed was the shutter & film? The wings would be expected to be blurred considering the rate at which they beat, but the body is usually hovering & therefore relatively static isn't it? I only mention this because you can't see any detail in the feathers of the body - which could have compensated for the loss of detail in the shadow of the face. A shame because the angle of the bird, the sky bgrd colour, & the plant from which it is feeding, all lend favourable ingredients for a top shot.

I was originally confused by your remark since the photo should have been sharp. After all (as written above), I was at ISO 400 and using a shutter speed of 1/750s on a lens of equivalent focal length of 480mm. Even my jittery hands aren't that bad. So I checked my original image, and I remembered that the image I uploaded was a severe crop (~ 1/5 of the original image), which could account for the lack of sharpness combined with the fact I was trying to manual focus on the hummingbird as it flitted about.

 

Regardless, I did some work on the original image, and uploaded a new crop. This version is even more severely cropped than before, but this time sharpened to bring out the detail on the bird more (on inspection, my original upload was a little too conservatively sharpened). Does it help?

Are you sure you used a shutter speed of 1/750 sec?

 

I used 1/320 sec and 1/400 sec shutter speeds and I was able to pretty much freeze the wing action on my hummingbird pics. So I would think 1/750 sec would have freeze it even better and have it not look blurred out like in yours.

Well, first off, the actual shutter speed was recorded automatically when the picture was shot, so assuming that my EOS D30 wasn't lying to me, yes, I shot it at 1/750s. I checked my other shots, and my other shots (several 1/750s shots and a 1/500s shot) also show blurred wings. Though, one shot had wings significantly less blurry than this one; I guess the above shot caught the wings when they were the fastest. As for why you claim not to need as fast shutter speeds to freeze the wings, perhaps this species of hummingbird has a much higher rate of flapping.

Hi Albert. Yes I think there is improvement in the body now. Not only in the detail but the colours also.