As the end of summer approaches, that means that the hummingbirds that come to my yard will soon be migrating back down south for the winter.
So I am running out of chances to get pictures of these cool birds before they are gone for the remainder of the year.
Before when I was photographing hummingbirds, I would normally just keep my aperture wide open to f/2.8. But I have noticed that the lines aren't very sharp and I would have different parts of the hummingbird out of focus.
This was because the depth of field was so small, so I knew I needed to close my aperture down a bit to get more of the bird in focus. But by doing that, it lowered the amount of light that was hitting my sensor.
I still wanted to stop as much motion as possible, so I couldn't increase the time my shutter was open. I needed to keep it as close to 1/8000th of a second so I could stop as much motion in the wings as possible.
So to able to still stop the motion of the wings and keep them from blurring too much, I had to increase the ISO. Shutterspeed, ISO and aperture are the three different pieces of the exposure triangle that you can adjust with your camera to get the images to look how you want them to.
The problem with increasing the ISO on your camera is that it introduces background noise to your images. Noise can look like static or grain in your images, but Lightroom has a lot of tools to get rid of the noise in your images. They have a denoise option that uses AI to clean the images up. The only downside of that is that you had to run each individual image through it and it takes a long time to do when you have multiple images.
I think the AI does a great job to get rid of the noise though. They make the images look like they were shot with the ISO set to its lowest setting. Prior to the AI doing it, you had to adjust several sliders and in doing so, it could make your images look a bit cartoony. So this new AI is a pretty big step up from what we had before.
I think the images ended up looking pretty cool though. I like how much sharper my images of the birds are compared to when I shot them at f/2.8. I think I shot these images at like f/3.5, and that made the image sharper and increase the depth of field a bit to get more of the bird in focus. Now I just need to work on getting closer to the birds when they fly in.
