Hummingbirds on the wing and a fast shutter speed.

Female Costa hummingbird hovering near a nectar-producing flower.

As a kid, I can remember a ruby-throated hummingbird visiting vibrantly coloured flowers near my home in Ontario.  Ever since then, I have been fascinated by them and photograph them frequently.  I have captured half a dozen species on film or digitally since then.  Most photos are done without flash, but all of them are done utilizing fast shutter speeds.  But how fast is fast enough?

The above photo was taken in the Palm Springs area a few days ago.  I used a D7100 and kit 55-300 mm lens to get the image with a wide open aperture (f/5.6) and a shutter speed of 1/500th of a second.  The kit equipment did a reasonable job, although the focusing speeds were slow and I could have used more magnification.  I decided to search my images for other photos I have taken and put together a composite image featuring different shutter speeds of the birds while flying.  You can see the image below.

You can see that as the shutter speeds slow down the blur of the wings increases.  Shooting at 1/400th of a second or higher seems to be the ticket if you want to get any sense of wing shape or the presence of primary feathers.  Using flash (last image above) produces both blur from the shutter speed and crisp edges from the ultra-fast flash burst in an interesting combination.  I have other photos taken at 1/1000th and 1/4000th of a second where the wings are even clearer, and one with flash only (shot at dusk with the flash producing the only measurable light) where the wings are absolutely frozen in time.

I think I like the 1/500th of a second shot the best.  Shooting in good light with a long lens at f/5.6 should produce fast shutter speeds at fairly low ISOs facilitating good images.  I often use an ISO of 100 or 200 to keep noise down.  As always, there is a balance between ISO and shutter speeds that requires some thought depending on the results you want to get with the equipment at hand.  I have done some blogs on this which you can search for in my now-considerably large collection.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com