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About the Hummingbird Photographs - page 2

For weeks on end, on every sunny day until early September, my time was spent near the flowers and Hummingbird feeder shooting and waiting to shoot. With persistence and the occasional fortunate luck finally the Hummingbirds had come to life in the many ways that the light shimmers and reflects off of their iridescent feathers. Now the hummingbirds had different textures across their tiny bodies, the bright red glow of the Ruby Throated male would be blackened by the angles of light while the wings could look to be flying and swimming at the same time. For such small subjects of interest, they always had a new surprise in the eyepiece. 

Light and shadow had brought the hummingbirds to life. Hundreds of shots later, the "keepers" on these pages have been cropped from high megapixel frames . The 11"x14"  prints are fantastic. Details and behaviors that are hard to see in the live flying hummingbirds are visible, leading to the wonder of what life must be like on such a small scale. Like the birds, all of the backgrounds in these shots are illuminated (or dark) from the filtered sunlight and shadows through the trees overhead and also from the very short depth of field (range of focus) limitations. 

The detail below is a crop shown at 1/2 actual pixel size, untouched from the original capture The spider web between the Hummingbird's eyes didn't seem to bother it too much. Such details are in many of the photographs on this site. In the case of the picture below the spider web shows the level of detail. It also reveals how miniscule the Ruby-throated Hummingbird really is.