October 3, 2006

Photographing the hummingbird.

You know you can't just photograph a hummingbird.

hummingbird

I was charmed to see two hummingbirds buzzing around a potted flowering plant by the entrance to the law school this morning. But unlike nearly everything else in the world, these things are quite resistant to the usual snapshot. There's a whole special science to photographing these hyperactive yet oddly stationary things.

9 comments:

Ken Mitchell said...

There is one and only one "trick" to photographing hummingbirds; high shutter speeds. Many years ago, I set up my Minolta camera (ASA-800 film) at 1/1000 shutter speed; the pix were crystal-clear.

That's one area in which digital cameras have not yet equalled their film counterparts.

Anonymous said...

How do we know that's not a mockingbird pretending to be a hummingbird?

Anonymous said...

Gggggggggggood ph-ph-ph-ph-ph-phoooooo-to

Paddy O said...

I don't know what's so hard about it.

Ann Althouse said...

Hey, I have a Nikon D-50... but I don't carry it around all the time!

Maxine Weiss said...

Mockingbird.

Peace, Maxine

Kayle said...

ken: you're simply incorrect about this. My Olympus E-100RS digicam (released around 2001) supports shutter speeds as high as 1/10,000 seconds. Granted, it isn't your typical digicam, but there is nothing about shutters which precludes high speed digital. (This is clearly a camera designed with sports in mind, it has a gyro stabilized 28-280mm equivalent zoom lens and can also take photos up to 15 fps, though at its full (not very high) resolution, the burst length is very limited).

I've taken photos of turboprop airplanes in which have the propellers have very little blur.

goesh said...

- such delightful little critters they are

Rick Lee said...

We had hummingbird week in the blogosphere back in August