Dennis Goulet — Page 12

Dennis September 2, 2010 4 Comments

Backyard Hummingbirds

After my trip to Costa Rica I planned to again try my hand at hummingbird photography in my yard. In past years, many hummingbirds, all Rubythroated, would visit my feeders. Usually one would arrive even before the feeder was up, hovering in front of the window location where it is usually mounted. Clearly that bird had been here before. This year was different. This year, we only had one male most of the time, with a second one showing up occasionally, and we had only three females. The male dominated the feeder until I set up a second one out of sight of the other. Now the male guards one feeder, and the three females seem to spend more time chasing each other around the other feeder than eating.

After several weeks of photographing, I haven’t been able to catch the male’s gorget fully lit up. Most captures that are a side view of the male results in dark, almost black gorget feathers. There always seems to be a dark patch of red gorget that never lights up. It’s very difficult to catch the throat lit up, and only seems to happen if the bird is facing the camera, but even then, there’s a patch in the center that doesn’t fully light up. I’ll have to experiment more with light placement to see if I can get better results. Up to now the two front lights have been to either side of the flower. Perhaps I need to place one below and directly in front of the bird. In the past, I’ve used a camera mounted flash with a BetterBeamer to trigger the other flashes. That may provide enough direct light, if lack of direct front light is the cause of the dark feathers.

I’ve been using the Canon 7D with the 500mm f4 Is lens since the birds were very wary of me being nearby. Now they are more comfortable with me there and I’ve been using the 100-400 zoom lens. . I can’t rotate my camera for vertical compositions because the built in flash controller of the 7D will not see all the remote flashes if I do so. So I’ve been taking images with less zoom with the intent of cropping for vertical presentation. The portrait images were taken this way.

There are not many more days to photograph hummingbirds; the males will leave soon and the females a couple of weeks later.

Dennis May 2, 2010

Costa Rica Photography Trip IV

One of the challenges I set myself was to capture hummingbirds landing. It’s not a matter of just setting the camera to the highest frame rate and hope for the best, but an anticipation that the landing was going to occur. With the lens focused on the flower, and framed wide enough to capture the bird as it came in, I’d take my eye away from the viewfinder and look at the larger scene to spot a hummer coming in for a landing.

Since the birds are attracted to the photographic setup using a feeder, the images are predominantly side views of the hummingbird coming in to the feeding tube. I tried to be aware of the flight of the hummer and attempt to get some images with the birds in different attitudes.

Another technique that Greg Basco suggested is to use a longer flash duration to get a little blur in the fastest moving parts of the hummingbird, the tips of the wings. In one setup we set the flashes to 1/8 power which froze the image of most of the bird. These two images were taken at f25 and using multiple flashes as the main light. In another setup where full sunlight was lighting the bird and background, the camera was set for a longer exposure to let the moving parts blur quite a bit, and the light from the flashes freezing a portion of the bird that did not move much. This had a lower success rate. The last three images were take at 1/25 second and f8. You can see the amount of wing motion in that short amount of time.

Dennis April 23, 2010

Costa Rica Photography Trip III

The planned itinerary offered the opportunity to photograph the Arenal Volcano at night, but this did not happen due to the log hanging clouds that persisted during out two night stay there. We did get to see some red streaks of red hot rock and lava on the lower slope of the volcano for about two minutes during dinner, and were treated to the grumbling and burping of the volcano throughout the night. No doubt it would have been spectacular.

Also on the itinerary was a visit to the Snake Zoo in nearby El Castillo. Greg Basco’s friend Victor Quesada runs the zoo and his collection of snakes, frogs and lizards are well cared for as evidenced by the condition of the animals and the cleanliness of their enclosures. Greg and Joe put together a studio set-up with flash, and softboxes for the small critters, and mostly used the distant landscape as a background, although some images used photographed backgrounds.. The branches and flowers used as props were collected on the side of the road before we arrived at Victor’s. As Joe has a great deal of experience handling venomous snakes, he set up a forest floor scene outside the front entrance, and Victor supplied him with the larger snakes to photograph. It was a great opportunity to photograph all these animals in a short period of time, and in a safe environment.

The images are of Red-eyed Tree Frog (2), Masked Tree Frog (2), Rainforest Frog, Eyelash Viper, Fer-de-lance, Neotropical Rattlesnake, and Souther Copperhead.