2014—Peek-A-Boo

Yes, another shot of a hummer. Well, make that two! This hummer is fully appreciative that the bubble’s back.

I took these shots this morning with the 70-200mm lens without the teleconverter and with the flash set to -1 stop. After conversing with Mike at my Camera Club last night, I was convinced that a little flash from the built-in flash is not a bad thing, especially when used as a fill flash. Our discussion related to freezing the motion of the hummer’s wings but their wings aren’t always moving and I thought this shot of the bird peeking from behind the bubble was very cute.

Also for the first shot, I used Adobe Camera Raw to process it. One of the things we learned from Moose, who hates Lightroom, is that ‘clarity’ will explode pixels (I think that’s the term he used) so now I’m afraid to use clarity at all. My friend Connie suggested I try using Adobe Camera Raw instead of Lightroom to see if I can get better noise results, so I did. I did the processing by the seat of my pants because I couldn’t find my cheat sheet. And, for some reason, I wasn’t bothered by the noise in this shot, even though the ISO was set to 320. In yesterday’s shot, over which I had conniptions, the ISO was only 250, not enough to cause noise. The noise must have resulted from other processing I did. Maybe Moose is right to hate Lightroom. But, I processed the other shot in LR and it looks fine to me.