Introduction and my first post - a hummingbird

[Desmond Chan]

Hi all,

I just joined BPN today !

A little bit about myself. When I first took up photography as an hobby, it was still a film world. It was about a year or so ago I started taking photographs again after a decade of not picking up a camera. By then, as you all know, digital photography has become the norm. After I got my hand on my first DSLR, I realized that, with an auto-focus camera, perhaps I could try my hand on bird photography. Well, that's how I started.

Anyhow, if it's OK, I would like to share with you one of my recent shots and would appreciate any comments to improve my photography. I'm new so I primarily am here to learn from you guys.

I'm not sure if this's the forum to post this photo as I'm not sure what it means by "hand of man". I took this photo at a sanctuary that happens to have a feeder at the entrance. So perhaps that is not exactly 100% in the wild? :)

Some info about this photo. I shot this with a Nikkor macro 105 f2.8 VR on a Fujifilm S5, ISO 100 at f4 and 1/1000, natural light, hand-held. Although I mentioned it's AF that got me into bird photography, this one was shot with manual focusing. So, a lucky shot :) I stood a few feet from the bird and this is one of the results. As you can imagine, this final image is a crop of the original full shot.

C&C welcome and will be appreciated !!

[Lana Hays]

Welcome, Desmond
An image is posted in this forum if there is a "hand of man" element present such as a feeder, fence post, barbed wire, etc. as well as any captive bird. Since this one was at a sanctuary near a feeder, it's ok to post it here. It's always good to give a little information about where or how you photographed the image as well as the technical data. One thing that would be helpful is to post a larger size (within the guidelines) of your image. The small image here is too small to tell anything about and unless you know to click on the image for a larger view, will probably go unnoticed. With that, the head of the hummer is very sharp. Nice blurring of the wings but I feel that the DOF may be too shallow and the rest of the hummer seems to blend in to the BG a bit too much. Hummers are fascinating to watch and a real challenge to photograph. If you get a chance to return, I'd certainly be trying many different angles and techniques to get more images.

[Desmond Chan]

Thanks for the comment, Lana!

About the photo size and the need to click to see the larger size, I finally found out why my pic showed up that small: I clicked the "attachment" icon on top of the message box. I edited my first message and reposted. It seems to work better now. Not that it will make it a better photo :o