Hummingbirds - August 2009

After watching all the Hummingbird activity in my neighbor's flower garden, I decided to put up a feeder. Well, it only took about 15 minutes for the first customer to arrive! I thought it would take a few days, at the very least.
It turned out getting them to the feeder was the easy part, photographing them was another story. After getting several blurred shots, shots with ghosting and blank frames (these things are fast), I came up with some good settings and techniques. First I figured out that they like to approach the feeder from the back side. To solve this I put a piece of tape over the one flower, forcing them to move to the side I was photographing from. Next, after reading Moose Peterson’s page on photographing Hummingbirds, I decided to do as he does, let the wings blur. To accomplish a good DOF I set the aperture at f8. This gave good focus from the bill to tail and let the trees in the background blur nicely. I tried to keep the shutter between 160 and 250 sec. so the wing movement would show. I used a tripod with the ball head set loosely to give me freedom of movement. Like I said, these birds move fast.

Equipment used:
Nikon D300
Nikon 18-200mm F/3.5-5.6G ED-IF AF DX VR
Tripod