Santa Barbara Photo of the Week by Bill Heller
Last weekend the Hummingbirds were very busy at the local nurseries. This girl (an Anna’s Hummingbird) in particular was spending a lot of time at her favorite flowers. She was not particularly excited to have me there at first. But it was easy to see she really loved these flowers, some kind of South African Lily I believe. So all I had to do was get a step closer each time she came by, and she eventually was pretty comfortable with me.
-Bill Heller
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BEAUTIFUL!
Great photo as usual, thank you bill. how lucky are we to live in a place with spring in December!
Now that’s a photo that demands explanation…what camera, equipment and settings are you using to catch that motion?
Beautiful Bill! That must be quite a camera to stop a humming bird.
Thanks everyone!
Actually, it’s less about the camera (in this case, a Canon 5D mark II with an average zoom lens at 300mm) and more about patience and bright sunlight. Most any camera would be plenty fast enough to get a similar shot in this kind of light. And you could completely freeze a hummingbird by adding a flash and adjusting settings accordingly. But personally I like a little movement in their wings. You can see that the wings are just slightly blurred from movement and I think that looks more natural than a strobe frozen shot.
I have taken similar shots ( http://www.billsphotooftheday.com/June_20_2007/ ) with a Canon AE-1 manual camera with ISO 50 film. The wings sweep further with slower speeds of course, but as long as the hummingbirds are hovering their bodies are quite still. The real trick is to be observant enough to learn their favorite flowers, and patent enough to let them fly away and come back several times to get comfortable with your presence. The film shot was taken after about an hour of slowly moving closer to the feeder with a 200mm lens.