Hummingbird — Page 2

Dennis July 21, 2011 1 Comment

Costa Rica 2011 The Art of Biodiversity – Part 3

Arenal Observatory Lodge

Arenal is the country’s most active volcano, with continuous emissions of lava and incandescent pyroclastic flows since the beginning of the present active cycle in 1968. In 2010 when I visited this location, the eruptions could be heard day and night roaring, coughing and spitting, but due to the low cloud cover, not seen. I did get a view of the pyroclastic flows through a break in the clouds for about 30 seconds one evening. The weather did cooperate this year with clear skies one evening and clear skies one morning during sunrise. Unfortunately, the volcano stopped erupting to a great extent three months prior to our visit. It was quiet.

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Dennis December 26, 2010 7 Comments

Audubon Magazine Birds In Focus Winner

Web Dennis_Goulet_GreenbreastedMango — Green-breasted Mango

GRAND PRIZE WINNER

My image of a Green-breasted Mango was selected as Grand Prize Winner of the Audubon Magazine Birds In Focus photography contest. It was selected from the 8,000 entries in this year’s competition. The image is one of the thousands of images I captured during my trip to Costa Rica in March 2010. You can find the announcement of the winners at Audubon Magazine.

Another of my entries was selected as one of the Top 100 images of the contest and can be seen here. Rather than tell you which one is mine, I’ll leave it to you to explore all of these wonderful images. After you see these images, you’ll understand how honored I am that my image was selected from among those images.

Click on the thumbnail to view a larger image.

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.