Female Rufous

Female rufous who is always at the feeder and only occasionally goes down to the flowers.
Finally, I just sat outside, focused on the flower patch and waited. After several trips to he feeder, she finally came down to the flowers. Got what I wanted.

What technical feedback would you like if any? Used the Dehaze all the way over to darken the back ground. i don’t think it messed up the other colors.

What artistic feedback would you like if any?

Pertinent technical details or techniques: Canon 7D Mark ll, Sigma C 150-600, 600mm, 1/4000sec, ISO 2500 f/6.3, Tripod

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Great wing position, Charlie, and I like the composition. I don’t know what was in the background, but I think I might prefer it with more detail. This almost gives it a flashed look.

It looks as if your focus is on the bloom itself rather than the hummingbird, which seems a bit out of focus. I use the same system and I haven’t found it too difficult to get a focus on the hummer before pulling the trigger-the 7DII Auto focus is fairly quick. Sometimes it will catch the wing, but a pretty fair percentage of the shots are well focused on the head.

Thanks. I had prefocused on the flower and was hoping for the best.

Hi Charlie: Prefocusing works if you’re using a multi-flash setup because when doing that you usually use a false background and the flash determines the exposure length, so you can use high f-stops and get a lot more depth of field. At f/6.3 and close enough to get a hummingbird to fill a reasonable fraction of the frame, the depth of field is pretty miniscule. It looks like you had plenty of light, so if you could have arranged your set-up with a lot of room behind the flower to blur the background, you might have been able to use a pretty high f-stop here. If you don’t mind blurred wings, 1/500 sec or so will give you a pretty good image of a Rufous. They hold their body pretty still when hovering (except the tail sometimes).

Pretty nice frame of the hummer. The contrast in the light is a bit on the harsh side, but not much you could do with the natural light. Too bad the hummer isn’t a bit sharper.