Delicate Delight

Hummingbirds are fascinating and beautiful…the perfect subject to photograph…and one of the most challenging.

This is an image I captured early last Saturday morning (6/24/11).  I spent a couple of hours and snapped more than 400 photos to come up with a handful of worthwhile images.

Snapping more than 400 photos sounds a lot harder than it was.  My camera has a setting that allows me to press and hold the shutter button and take up to 10 frames per second. With that kind of speed, you can knock out an SD card full of images pretty quick.

The greatest challenge, at least for me, is to capture the birds in focus.  When in flight, they are constantly zipping in and out, back and forth, up and down. I had an embarrassing amount of empty frames, where the bird had left the field of view before I could snap…or stop snapping.   When I did catch the bird in the frame, they often were blurry.

With enough patience, some experimentation and a bit of dumb luck, I was able to get a few “keepers.”  This is a good example.  I’ll be posting a few more in the next few days, so check back.

(Click the image to see a larger version.)

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