Hummer Help

[Dirk W]

I had to bump up the ISO to 1000 or so to even get up to 1/1250 because of the light today. I've got a set up where the next time I have good light I'll be able to get the shutter speed up at lower iso's. The background flower colors can be manipulated from yellows to the purples depending on how I manage the feeder. Let me know how to do better if you can. This is fun stuff. My post processing skills are still crude.

[Steve Foss]

Dirk, these look pretty good. At that ss, I'm going to guess these are handheld, due to your allllllmmmost nailing the sharpness on the first two and the lack of it on the third.

If these are handheld, a tripod with a ballhead set fairly loose or a monopod will gain you the equivalent of a solid three stops of shutter speed over handheld, so that's one thing to do if you're not doing that so far. Not an easy exercise to use a tripod or monopod for BIF, but once mastered it's a great skill to have. In this case, if your 70-200 f2.8L is the non-IS version, that's even more important. With IS, you can get away with handheld somewhat more often, but a tripod/monopod is still a good deal.

When it comes to backgrounds, well, backgrounds are as important as the subject itself. I like to isolate the hummer totally from the background. A bright sharp hummer in the foreground can be hurt by a bright splotch of flower in the BG because it's distracting. That's a matter of personal taste, however, and varies from viewer to viewer.

To make sure the BG is nice and blurry with that creamy bokeh we all love, I place my hummer setup so I've got green bushes/shrubs/trees 30 feet behind it with nothing in between. Having the shallow DOF f2.8 offers helps with the background bokeh, but in the end the more important consideration is placing the background far enough away. I shoot a lot at f8 with my 100-400L IS, and with the BG 30 feet away it's very nice. Oh, and while the green of the hummers may seem like it ought to blend into the green of the BG, the BG is so out of focus that it really doesn't.

You might also set up a perch a couple feet from the feeder, which will allow those territorial males to guard the feeder from other hummers by hanging there, and then you can get some perched shots as well. I recommend a single twig so the perch is clean and sharp and the hummer doesn't have a lot of perches to choose from.

I can't tell from the exif, but I'm going to assume you selected Al servo focus and the center focus point. The 30D has a feature that allows it to focus more precisely and quickly with a lens capable of f2.8 than with slower lenses, so that's helping you. But the center focus point is more precise than any other in the array, and if you just let the camera figure out which one to choose, you not only run the risk an incorrect choice, but it takes the camera longer to figure all that out than if you select the focus point for it. With fast action and the 30D, the center point is best and you can crop later if you like.

Also, the fastest burst rate is the way to go, and keep that shutter depressed for at least five or six images in a burst. Because there's always a bit of inadvertent jerking of the camera when the shutter is depressed, the middle/end of a burst is generally sharper than the initial image or two.

The loud slap of the 30D shutter isn't so great from the close distances you're at with the 70-200 (from six feet away, even inside a blind, I often scare birds off their perches with my 30D shutter). But hey, you can't have everything.

Good luck, and have a blast!

[Dbl]

Steve has great advice but I will give you one tip that will make your pictures considerably brighter and more colorful on the web. Your photos are in Adobe RGB color space, anything on the web will have considerably more pop to it by making sure you are in sRGB. I converted one of your shots in CS2 and it made a huge difference. A bit of selective sharpening also worked well, especially on shot #1. Nice captures by the way.

[Dirk W]

OK, I've got some "fore sure" things to try for tomorrows hummer shoot. No tripod yet so I'll hope for great light and a steady hand. They are starting to get more comfortable with the shutter slap so I should get lots of practice. I'll post the highlights .

[Steve Foss]

Excellent additional advice from Dbl. Good stuff, Dan.

sRGB is the Web standard, which is why images converted from Adobe RGB to sRGB look better online. Ultimately, Adobe RGB has the broader color space and theoretically allows more subtle color and larger prints before the color starts to "fall apart," but you've generally got to make a really big print and compare them side by side before you can see the difference.

Like Dan, I use selective sharpening often. You do it by lassoing the subject carefully and sharpening the subject only. Then I often select "inverse" and run Noise Ninja on the whole background to further smooth it out, sometimes also running the inverse through "gaussian blur." These are Photoshop functions, and some experimenting is in order. Too much noise reduction or gaussian blur on the BG and it starts to look REAL fakey.

Keep on keepin' on, Dirk.

[Dirk W]

These birds are a challenge. The male is much more spooky than the female and the male won't let others around when he's hungry. I'm learning alot about DOF at 8ft, 200mm and f2.8 - not much. Geez - light is important!! These pics are a little better. How would I properly expose without blowing out the white? Is that fixable in PP?

I was reading about the lighting systems people use to completely freeze action. Maybe in the future . Any more advise?

I like the little web stuff on the beak....

[MN Shutterbug]

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How would I properly expose without blowing out the white? Is that fixable in PP?

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First, your first hummer in this posting is super. To avoid blowing out the whites you would need to use decrease the exposure compensation by a little. Problem is, if you have dark areas, they could go too black. Sometimes, if the light is too harsh, you just can't avoid it. PP cannot bring back what was never there to begin with. Pure whites and solid blacks contain no info.

Keep posting, they keep getting better.

[Steve Foss]

Your whites in the first and third images of this second set are fine. The first shows some hot spots, but they don't look completely blown out. The third shot is just dead on (and, by the way, a dynamite pose). The second, of course, looks quite overexposed.

Using exposure compensation as mentioned is important. Equally as important is to shoot under ideal lighting conditions. If you shoot when there's somewhat flat but not dark light, which you get with light overcast skies, you don't get such hot spots on the whites. Same if you shoot only early morning or late evening sunlight, which is low in the sky and much more gentle.

Part of the problem mentioned when using EC and shooting a subject in bright sun is the shadow areas already are very dark, and using a -EC setting to underexpose a bit for the whites will just make those shadow areas dark holes.

Be patient with the light. Don't bother shooting until you get good light. Nothing more disappointing than a fantastic pose captured crisply that's too hot. The exception to that is experimentation with iso, ss, aperture and such to figure out how to get sharp images with the right blur in the BG, like you've been doing, which is valuable anytime if you don't mind harshly lit subjects AND come back to get better keepers in better light.

In PP, avoid using the contrast feature. It is a blunt tool that does increase contrast but will blow out already pale whites at the drop of a hat. Quick and dirty to bump contrast, I go into the levels and slide the mid-range level a bit left to lighten mid range, then bring the left-hand shadow slider to the right to slightly darken shadows. That adds contrast but, since you've left the highlights alone in the levels, it doesn't lighten them.

Have you PP'd these images? If you have, it's possible they are exposed differently than they look on the screen, and you should re-post them with no PP so we can get a better idea of your initial exposure.

[Dirk W]

I did a little PP. Mostly sharpening. I had my saturation, contrast, and sharpening bumped up a twish in camera for experimentation. Feel free to PP and post again if you want. I'd love to see what these photos could look like. Here are the originals:

[Steve Foss]

Dirk, I did a bit.

There's wasn't much to be done in the two well exposed images, because your in-camera boosts of saturation and contrast delivered about right. In the overexposed image, I darkened mid-range levels, which helped a little bit, but the highlights were clipped off in the levels palette, which makes it clear some were blown out.

In all three cases I lassoed the birds in photoshop and selected inverse, which highlighted the BG. Then I ran the BG through noise ninja, which turned it less grainy and more buttery.

I also lassoed the bird in all three and applied selective sharpening to the bird itself, though not very much, again because of the in-camera settings. In No. 3, the best of the bunch, I only selected the parts of the bird that already were in focus and selectively sharpened those a touch.

Also in all three, I boosted saturation just slightly.

A note about in-camera settings. When shooting RAW, the settings controlling sharpness, saturation and contrast do no apply and do not operate. They only work when shooting jpeg. It's also not a good idea to boost them. It's much better to take control of the image yourself in pp than to let the camera do it. Today's DSLRs are quite sophisticated, but the needs of individual images vary and the blanket approach to those settings sometimes does things to images we don't want. And once it's done in the camera, it's too late to get it back in pp. No. 1, I think, is a good example of that. While the image is overexposed for sure, bumping contrast in the in-camera settings caused more blown-out whites.

[MarchelRipley1]

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How would I properly expose without blowing out the white? Is that fixable in PP?

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You understand that alot of your background in these shots is very dark and you have a bright white female or immature hummer in these pics, your sensor is metering on all of that dark and therefore you are blowing out the whites. Now your camera is probably different than mine, but I usually start out at -1 1/3 to 2 stops on EV and try to shoot at ISO 200 around F/7.1 or F8 with approx a 1/640 sec shutter time. Try underexposing the image at these levels and I'll bet you they turn out with much more visable details.