Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: First try at hummingbird pictures, 0 by UncleGreenthumb

UncleGreenthumb wrote:
Hi Datura;,,

I'm using a Canon 10D dslr with a 20mm lens for these as a lot of these hummers are quite use to me being around them.. I have a few that are still gun shy yet but the biggest majority of them I can feed from my hands with an eye dropper...The biggest problem I encounter is trying to keep from over exposing the shots in the bright sunlight... You need enough light to freeze some of the wing action.. I tried using the flash but it just spooks the birds to bad.. The other thing is trying to get them use to the shutter noise when your shooting that close..That spooks them also but their getting use to the noise from the camera...

I find shooting at 800 iso and an f-stop of 11 works about the best without ending up with a lot of jpeg artifacts in the images.. If the sunlight is really intense, I can, at times move down to 400 iso.. If you can get a day with filtered sunlight, thats seems like the best light to shoot in when trying to get these kind of shots....