Hummingbirds

Late this afternoon, in the last good light for photography, I went out and took about 75 photos of the relatively few hummingbirds that were sucking sugar water from our feeders. The image immediately at right shows one of my favorites: a female Allen’s or Rufous (I can’t tell them apart). In the first two rows below are several more examples of females from the same species.

Click on any of these photos to get a (much) larger version…

Another one I particularly like is the male black-chinned hummingbird (at lower right, below). They’ve got a beautiful brilliant royal purple throat patch, but only if you catch them at exactly the right angle — which of course I failed to do in any of my photographs. The others are either Anna’s or black-chinned females.

Notice the hummer traffic jam in some of these pictures? And this was before things get really busy tonight!

For the shutterbugs out there: these were all taken at very short range: 3.5” to 11”. I used a nominal 100mm macro lens, but my camera body effectively multiplies the focal length by 1.6, so you can think of it as a 160mm lens. The light is all natural, late afternoon shade. Most of them were taken at 1/350th, time priority, and 100 ASA equivalent; a few were at 1/500th and 400 ASA equivalent. The equipment was a Canon D20 body and Canon EOS 100 macro lens. All were handheld.