Photographing Hummingbirds

[Dennis]

In a recent post I did of the hummingbirds, I was shooting at a bit of a distance with the 500mm lens and although I did not do to bad with the morning shoot I did however found a way that just may get you more keepers.

Here is what I did.

I moved forward till I was at the min focus length for the 500mm lens. I took 3 steps back to allow me some room in case the Hummingbirds landed into another area, prefocus on an area and wait for them to show up.
When the birds show up they will fill in your camera frame more for one, and focus lock is much better in close than further away. What I think is that the lens travel to lock on is much shorter and therefore faster. If you are further away from the subject the lens will try to lock on, but it has more travel in order to lock onto the bird.

I can tell you that my success rate up to min focus was much better than further away from the subject. It is about 15` min and I was shooting 25`+ feet.

I though since there was a couple of mesages about Hummingbirds that I would share this information.

[ncphotos]

Thanks for the info Dennis I think this will help for sure.
I was wonder what helped you pick the spot you thought the humming birds where going to be at for the shot?



Thanks,

[Dennis]

Thanks for the info Dennis I think this will help for sure.
I was wonder what helped you pick the spot you thought the humming birds where going to be at for the shot?



Thanks,

Well this really worked for me and I hope that this will work for you and the others as well.

Well the park that I go to to photograph the Humming birds has about 75 yards of flowers along this one area. The thing that I look for here is the flowers and if they are still in full bloom, if not I will pick an area that the flowers look better than the others and setup the gear. Plus the fact that I have been in this area for a few years now and know that they are around here. When I setup the gear, which is sort of in the middle of this stretch, and what I do from this point is look up and down the area to see where the hummingbirds are more so than other areas and move if need be.

The key is if you know that the birds are around, you need to wait up to a 1/2 hour or less for them to return and even sometimes longer. On this day I waited an hour before they started to show up and in seconds they are gone and 15 minutes later they came back and this went on all morning so you need to have patients with them.

[Tom Pryor]

This is good info here Dennis, hope to get out and shoot some this weekend.

[Dennis]

This is good info here Dennis, hope to get out and shoot some this weekend.

Tom they may still be around in your area, but I think that they will be gone from here and with rain all weekend I would be surprised if they are there next week.

[Wayne Brown]

Man I wished I had this information sooner in the year to try this out they might be gone now rain here in Sarnia.