Hummingbirds are super fast little creatures. And the closer you are to them trying to get pictures, the harder it seems to be.
For these shots, I was probably within about three feet of them. That may not seem like it is too close, but when using a 200mm lens, the birds take up most of the frame, so trying to get them in frame before they disappear is pretty tricky.
I was sitting underneath the feeders and had my camera ready and pointed up in the general direction that they normally fly in to get a drink. I had to be careful to not move too quickly because it would scare them and they just fly right off.
Luckily I was able to get some decent shots before it got too dark to continue taking them. I had to bump up my ISO pretty high to be able to have a decent shutter speed that didn't totally blur the wings. Lightroom has a pretty cool denoise feature that uses AI to clean up the image and remove noise in the images from shooting at a high ISO.
It worked pretty good to clean the images up, the only downside is that it can take a while for each image. It usually takes about 30 seconds for the denoise to complete. It may not seem like a long time, but if you are trying to edit a lot of low light images, it can really add up.
I thought this image was pretty funny. I have so many yellowjackets that hang out at the feeders and think they own it. Every now and then the hummingbirds would get chased away by the yellowjackets. Or the yellowjackets would end up fighting each other so they could have the sugary drink all to themselves.
