Sunday, May 28, 2006

Hummingbird at feeder - A lesson in digital photography

I was studying my camera a couple of days ago when I noticed a hummingbird at the feeders outside the dining room window. Here are three shots. The first without flash. The other two are with flash, which of course reflected off the window. These have been cropped, but not otherwise processed. The ISO was 800 because I didn't have time to change the settings from the night before.


1- 300 mm., f/5.6, 1/2000 sec., ISO 800
2- 300 mm., f/5.6, 1/200 sec., flash, ISO 800
3 - 300 mm., f/5.6, 1/200 sec., flash, ISO 800

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is interesting to see how the color interpretation changes in the flashed picture.It is always difficult to take photos of a dark bird against a bright background. Depending on your camera you could try to set exposure compensation to +1.

robin andrea said...

Interesting comparisons, Pam. Do you always manually set your exposure? Sometimes I use the auto settings just to see what the camera "thinks" and then I experiment.

Cute hummingbird. We have the rufus coming to our feeders.

Taradharma said...

Pam, I love to see the "process."

Also, love the photos of woodpeckers...geez, I miss a few days and look at all you've done!

Mary said...

Such wonderful birds. I wish we had them wild here in England.

Pam in Tucson said...

Thanks, jimmy - I thought they were interesting and I learned from them.

daniel - Thanks for the tip. I'm just learning about exposure now.

robin andrea - My m.o. is to set the aperture and let the camera set the shutter speed (not always, of course). I usually focus manually, since the Canon seems to want to focus on something completely different from what I'm interested in. We seem to get mostly broad-tailed hummingbirds coming to the feeder, although in the bright sunlight it's often hard to tell.

tdharma - The "process" is pretty iffy so far. I'm looking forward to real retirement, when I hope I can really learn some of this stuff. Weren't the woodpeckers fun?

mary - We love the hummingbirds. When we lived on the east coast we only had one kind. In southern Arizona we see several different kinds.