Broad Billed Hummer

[Ian Cassell]

Canon 7D
Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L
Canon 430EX + BB

1/1250sec f/6.3 ISO 400

Slight crop for composition, levels, sharpening in CS5

[Jeff Cashdollar]

Ian,

Beautiful hummer, the colors are fantastic. This is a strong angle but the throat underside is stunning. The flash might be a little too much - see what others say. What was your distance and flash setting. As you know the BB can add a stop or more of light and the flash's beam can be spread to optimize lighting. For example set flash zoom manually for 50MM to get good spread of light to BB. In my notes from a series I attended on using BB. They said the BB can add up to 2 stops of light or double the flash distance. Hence watch for over flash when using this device. Flash can depend on multiple variables and I mention this only to get you thinking about this science. Moreover, ETTL, flash compensation settings and using the BB.

It could be my monitor, did you run noise reduction. As always, thanks for sharing.

ps - I would remove the dust web under the throat as well.

[Ian Cassell]

Thanks, Jeff. I was worried that I was a bit heavy with the flash, and I guess you confirmed that. I don't use my BB often, so I guess I need more practice. No, I didn't use NR on this one. I didn't really think it needed it, but will go back and try it with some to see how it does.

[Cheryl Slechta]

Ian, it looks like it needs a round of NR on my monitor. Also evicting the spider web:S3: The colors on the hummer are gorgeous - we don't get them in Florida - mostly ruby-throats.

[John Chardine]

Yes the throat colours are great. Agree the flash is heavy. Was there any compensation dialed in? You can see a hint of "steel-eye/red-eye" from the flash, which can be fixed. The other thing I would suggest is to routinely run NR on the background if the noise is noticeable. This simple act increases the apparent image quality and will allow saving a jpeg for BPN with a lot less compression.

[Kerry Perkins]

Hi Ian, I think the BB may have been overkill for this little one. I see a very hot spot of light on the bird, right around the mid-section, and I'm guessing you were pretty close. Would be good to know what the flash exposure compensation was in this case. It probably should have been pretty big, like -2 or more. I would encourage you to experiment further with the BB, as I find it invaluable for getting good fill light onto birds, but like other flash techniques there is a sweet spot of distance.

[Ian Cassell]

I see I have a lot of practice to do with the BB. It adds one more variable that I need to wrestle with. Thanks for all the comments.