A first attempt
During a moment of respite, we received an invitation from friends to go to their cottage for a weekend. Once there, I was happy to notice that they had a hummingbird feeder. It was installed on the corner of the house just on the other side of a balcony; close enough so I could touch it.
I installed my camera on a tripod with a trigger and selected the burst mode to maximize my chances; God knows these birds can move so quickly! I then tried to compose the image to have the least possible white areas caused by the holes between the leaves of the trees. In my first attempt, I used a zoom to be relatively “far” from the feeder (at about 1 meter because of the minimum focus distance) so I would not disturb the hummingbirds. Unfortunately, the lighting conditions were not optimal and the speed ended up being quite slow despite a fairly high ISO (3200-6400). In addition, I had to reduce my depth of field to have a “reasonable” speed. To make matter worse, it was windy: the feeder was swaying in the wind and it was thus getting out of focus.
After filling out a first memory card of unsuccessful attempts, I decided to change my strategy: the birds did not seem too be bothered by my presence. So, I changed lens to have a zoom including a wide-angle. The downside with this lens is that it made the background much too distracting given the depth of field… I gave up the project momentarily; the weather did not seem favourable because of the gray clouds that were gathering.
Back to the big zoom!
A little later, the sky cleared and the area was much brighter. So I put my big zoom again and positioned the camera even closer to the feeder. I made a series of photos with a more closed down aperture and a higher speed while maintaining an ISO of 5000. It was still windy… I selected a burst mode with the electronic shutter allowing me to have a sequence of 14 frames per second! The combination of speed-depth-of-field-ISO factors allowed me to obtain sharp and interesting images. Here is the result (click on the images to have a bigger view):
