Young White Throated Hummingbird

[Ramon M. Casares]

Hi everybody, I have not been able to participate much, a lot of work and projects need my almost total focus.
But this weekend I went to work with Hummingbirds and wanted to share a few with you, here´s a young guy that to me looked preety cool. I didn´t work with flash (or flashes) just a cloudy sky. Hope you like it! Enjoy.

Canon EOS-1D Mark II N
Manual Exposure
Tv: 1/2000
Av: 4.0
ISO: 500
EF300mm f/2.8L IS USM
RAW
WB: Cloudy
AF AI servo
Tripod
Feeder

[Kiran Poonacha]

Great Show Bhai, nice to see your pic.. great image considering no flash... Nice colours, details is top and nice pose too.. well done..

[Deborah Hanson]

Love the photo. Great pose and detail (sharpness is wonderful). It is nice to see detail in wings without the flash (I am not great with flash and hoped that my new camera would allow for higher shutter speeds to catch the wings:)).
Thanks for posting. Hope to see many more.

[Fabs Forns]

Amazing freezing action for 2000 and no flash, feathers look pretty good too. You've been missed around here, but if it means you are busy with projects, we forgive you :)
Very cool pose, although the HA police would give you a ticket :p
Can't wait to see more.

[Adrian David]

Excellent pose and details! Great natural light!

[Dan Busby]

Very nice Ramon. The smoothness of the BG is to die for! Great detail, sharpness and "pose".

[Michael Stern]

Ramon,
Like it? No, LOVE IT!!
and no flash!
Great...show me how!
Mike

[Ramon M. Casares]

Mike, with the MarkIIN burst and the AI SERVO I can, with a bit of luck, capture this guys flight in the exact moment when they stop moving their wings during flight, it doesn´t last much but I have shot more than 3000 images in the last two days, this photo is one of the ones I got in that instant.
:)

Thanks to all for your kind words and comments. I apreciate them.

[rajivsarathy]

Very nice. Is the background shade natural, or did you shift it during postprocessing? It is so uniform and complements the bird's colors nicely.

[Ramon M. Casares]

Natural BG, it is just grass wich blurs very easily. Thanks for the kind words.

[Melvin Grey]

This is really excellent Ramon, the pose feather detail and natural light modelling - just what we aim to achieve when using flash! With 90 - 120 wingbeats per second the chances of hitting that 'still spot' at either full forward or backward position is very difficult, even shooting in motordrive bursts. The ambient light must have been very high to give 1/2000ths sec at ISO500 on a cloudy day, here in the UK we would never get those light levels - but then we don't have hummers either! Great to have you back - let's see some more.

[Hendri Venter]

WOW!! Outstanding image. The pose, IQ and detail rocks. Well done Ramon.

[Greg Basco]

Ramon, really nice work; looks similar to the results from a well-done multi-flash setup ;) Seriously, I know that shooting hummingbirds with natural light results in a low success rate but when you get a winner, as you have here, the work pays off.

Saludos,
Greg

[Ramon M. Casares]

Hi everybody, here´s the Raw so you can see that I had to recompose, these guys movements are so fast that except for when they are flying in the same place, there´s preety hard to compose correctly, as you can see I moved my spare BG from the right to the left, hope you don´t think I tried to deceive you or something :)

[adrian dancy]

Very impressive!