I have a planter in my backyard that holds 3 cubic yards of soil. I put it there to grow some vegetables a couple of years ago but I was very unsuccessful with that venture. This year in February I threw three bags of wildflower seeds and a sack of compost into it to see what would happen. What happened was a 6 feet tall jungle-like patch of wildflowers. It does provide me with a lot of color to see when I look out the back, which is better than a gray fence. I’m afraid to know what’s living in the jungle, but the flowers on top attract hummingbirds.

As luck would have it, this is all positioned such that I can sit in the shade of my porch shooting at 800mm and this about perfect for shooting the hummingbirds. So, I spent a lunch hour doing just that.

Hummingbird wings are very fast and the birds difficult to track and react to, so my strategy is medium-wide area autofocus, really fast shutter speed, and high-speed continuous shooting with electronic shutter. This gives me 20 frames per second with the Nikon Z6 III. So, when get the hummingbird in the viewfinder I hold the shutter down and take a burst of photos. I generally get a few photos from each burst that have the wings in a good place.

If you don’t shoot at a high shutter speed you get a lot of motion blur. But the higher your shutter speed goes, the higher the ISO goes and you get a bit more noise in your photo. But as you will see, high ISO isn’t such a big problem, especially when you have plenty of light. The first photo below was shot at 1/3200 second and ISO9000 (base ISO on this camera is 100). Noise correction was applied in Lightroom. The wings are mostly frozen but you can see some blur around the wing tips.

In the next image below I sped up to the shutter speed to 1/6400 second and ended up with at ISO14400. As you can see the wings are frozen in time and with noise reduction, you can’t really see much of a problem with noise. I maybe lost a little sharpness. I do like the emerald feathers on the bird’s back.

I also shot a few at a slow shutter speed of 1/1600 second. You can see that the flower is perfectly sharp, but the bird wings are blurry and even the bird beak is a bit blurred. So even though I got the ISO down to 3600, the results were a bit blurry.

In general, I don’t mind if the wings show a little motion blur as it adds action and energy to the photograph. Hummingbirds are energetic little animals and it is fun to see them doing what they do best. I was also amazed and pleased at how their feathers picked up the orange color from the flowers. They are actually gray/green birds but in some of the photos they look a bit orange. A nice bit of wildlife to be able to enjoy in my backyard.

Thanks for reading.