2013—Overlooked

I was looking at some of the hummingbird photos that I took a few days before Thanksgiving and I was astonished to find three that I overlooked because I was intrigued by their bathing antics the day I took these shots so I ignored the flying shots. That is surprising to me because I try very hard to get shots of them in flight. I took these using the speed light with the shutter speed set to 1/800. Hyper-sync flash settings on my D7100 and D800 allow me to use shutter speeds faster than the camera’s stated limit of 1/250, perfect for stopping hummingbirds in flight. I had the 70-200mm lens attached to the Nikon D7100 and I had to keep changing the focal length to get the hummers in focus, the first at 70mm, second at 122mm, and the third at 145mm. I wasn’t completely successful in getting the wings stopped but I got pretty darned close. The azaleas behind the fountain are a riot of greens and yellows and despite the relatively shallow depth of field, they are distracting so I played with the hue/saturation/luminance sliders to fade the background colors. The first two shots are the male Anna’s Hummingbird and the third is the female.