The Artful Engineer

This week we take a break from our usual assortment of neglected structures for something completely different. After our few days in Cheyenne (covered in the last two posts) we spent a week up on Casper Mountain. The house/cabin we rented was well-equipped with hummingbird feeders and no shortage of hummingbirds. I’ve gotten a smattering of decent hummingbird images over the years, including a few on Vancouver Island featured in a post last year, but having the chance to work with them across a number of days really helped get some good results.

I think the image above sets a new high-ISO record for me, at least for an image worth having. Pretty crazy.

There were two species of hummingbirds at the feeders: the ones with the pink throats are called broad-tailed hummingbirds and the ones with the black throats are (unimaginatively) called black-throated hummingbirds. This little guy, below, was every bit as tiny as he looks sitting on this turnbuckle.

I enjoyed the various poses and lighting conditions that I accumulated over the week. One benefit of having multiple sessions in one location was that I started to pay more attention to the backgrounds; a distracting background really sabotages images like these.

I have about 350 images of the hummingbirds from my week’s stay on the mountain. While I primarily chose this selection based on avoiding repetition, I also didn’t like having the actual birdfeeders in the image—just the birds—so I chose images where I could crop out the birdfeeder if necessary. Or, like this next one, where the birdfeeder intruded a little into the bottom right corner of the frame, I removed it with a little digital sleight of hand.

Hummingbirds are undeniably fun to watch in real life, but it is also exciting to see them (mostly!) frozen in time. You can see so much detail that is impossible in real time. To me, the primary thing that a still photograph fails to capture well is the iridescence of their feathers as they move. Even so, they are definitely fascinating when rendered in a nice still image.

I hope you enjoyed this little diversion into (admittedly baited) wildlife photography. Next up on the blog will be a short series from a recent trip to Michigan, my 50th state. Michigan in the fall is special, as I will do my best to prove over the coming weeks. Thanks for following along!