Hummingbird Photography
In April I saw my first hummingbird of the season, in Greensboro, NC. It’s time to get those feeders up and ready for the season. The males always show up first and offer some good photos before the females complete their migration.
While spending the last two years trapped at home in Covid lockdown, I decided to work at perfecting a system to photograph hummingbirds in my backyard. I have a system now that works, and I want to share that process. The steps and equipment I will explain are very general and will work with about any equipment you own. Maybe you can experiment using my ideas and your equipment to develop a system that works for you.
I use flashes to stop the wing motion during my photography. Some people like to show the wings in motion, but I prefer to stop the motion and not have the wings blur. My system requires the use of a background, and my favorite background is an out of focus photo of my front yard grass during the hot summer drought of last year. I printed this photo on my 13 by 19 printer, but you could just take it to Office Depot and have them print it for you using matte paper.
I use the Olympus OM-1 Mirrorless Digital Camera with a 100-400mm lens most of the time. The flashes are Godox VING V860II, TTL Li-Ion Flash Kits, and the Godox XProS TTL Wireless Flash Trigger to match your camera. This flash has a large rechargeable lithium battery which allows you to shoot very fast. I shoot at 8 frames per second.
As you can see from the setup photo, I use four flashes. One flash is on the background, one flash points to the bird’s throat, and two flashes are above the bird. Each flash is about 15 inches from the bird and flower. Believe it or not, the birds do not care! I place my setup near where the feeder would normally hang. The feeder is removed during the photo session, and I place the setup flowers near that location. The hummingbird food is placed inside the flower using a needle (5 Pack 5ML/CC Premium Ink Filling Syringe with plastic blunt needle tip for fountain pen from Amazon). The hummingbirds love the Pennington, Ready to Use, Electro Nectar Clear Hummingbird Food, 80 oz. Bottle from Walmart.
My editing is done in Lightroom and Photoshop by adjusting exposures, contrast, color, and color temperature (all the normal edits). There is one trick I use in Photoshop that I love, and it makes a world of difference to my photos. After all my normal edits are done, I use a new feature in Photoshop called Sky Replacement to add textured backgrounds to some of my photos. Go to Edit-Sky replacement and click on the small PLUS at the bottom to add your own textures. You can make or buy textures. I like to buy my textures from https://www.dailytexture.com/ and make sure you use the coupons that are located on her website to save money!
One question I get a lot is “Where do I focus”? One way to focus is to use manual focusing or back button focusing and focus on the flower that the bird is going to feed from and then recompose so you have both the bird and the flower in your composition. The other way is to use the single spot autofocusing system on your camera, the touch screen, and try to touch the screen to get a great composition that includes the bird and the flower. In either case, you will need to practice until you get it right.
I normally buy my flowers from the local farmer’s market when in season. The season is very short and sometimes I buy flowers from Lowes Foods. I bought a group of 4 stems of Peruvian Lilies from Lowes Foods for four dollars. The hummingbirds love the red flowers more than any other color.