Hummingbird Sipping Nectar

The plant is a Crocosmia, something I'd never heard of until we found them in the yard at this house after we moved in.

Female Anna’s Hummingbird

I have been photographing birds for a few years, and I have been slowly learning how to capture various types of photos. I started out photographing around feeders, and slowly began to include more semi-wild photos (birds in the trees and bushes around our house).

I recently learned that there was a tool I hadn’t know about that can be very helpful for photographing birds at higher scales, a gimbal mount. The Wimberley is one of the classics, but expensive; I bought a used one from another manufacturer. It provides easy but balanced motion in vertical and horizontal pointing.

I intended to get shots of Crocosmia flowers, which had just started to bloom yesterday.

While I was shooting, one hummingbird after another buzzed the Crocosmia. I got out my bird setup: Sony α1, 200-600 lens, and gimbal.

At first I got shots of bird butts, so I moved the tripod 90º to the left and got the shot above not long after.

Technical note: The light was poor (overcast, heavy clouds), so I had to use settings that would balance my requirements: a low ISO, to limit noise in the images; a high f-number because of the best the lens can do is f/6.3; and a shutter speed that was fast enough to get the birds while feeding, but not fast enough for hummingbird’s high-speed wing beats.

The high-speed continuous shooting occasionally captured a wing at one end of its travel or the other, and in that brief ‘pause’ I could get something to record. The shot at the top was one of those.

Here’s an example of what can go wrong: the wings almost disappear because of rapid motion, and the head feathers are also slightly smeared because of motion.

Here is a shot at the opposite end of the wing stroke:

And here is a perfect shot from the side showing feather detail around the eye and throat: