Thursday, April 15, 2010

Anna's Hummingbird portrait

Anna's HummingbirdAnna's Hummingbird, Forest Grove, Oregon on 15 April 2010 by Greg Gillson.

 

This afternoon I decided to shoot some photos at the hummingbird feeder. I'm still trying to get good photos of full adult male Rufous and Anna's Hummingbirds. And, well, I'm still trying....

Instead I got photos of this Anna's Hummingbird. It may actually be a recently-fledged bird. The fresh plumage of the head feathers show crisp gray borders.

My recent bird photos (except for some digiscoped ones) are taken with my Canon 100-400mm image stabilized lens. This allows me to hand-hold the camera and get very good photos. However, today I put the camera on the tripod. This allows very sharp photos at much lower shutter speeds than I can take hand-holding.

This photo is cropped to less than 25% of full frame to show the feather details (click on photos to see full size). The lens was only zoomed about 2/3 of full (285 mm), f7.1, 1/1000 second, ISO 400, exposure compensation -0.3.