Answers to Your Hummingbird Questions

I got several questions about my previous post, so I thought I would provide additional information for my blogging buddies (and share another picture).

We got the hummingbird feeder and little suction cup hook at our local Wal-Mart. Both were inexpensive. To make sure that the holder would be able to manage the weight of the filled feeder, we tested it out for several days with plain water. It held up just fine! The feeder is made from plastic, measures about 7 inches high, and holds perhaps two cups of liquid. If there are flowers prevalent in your locale, then you should be able to attract these precious creatures.

To get the pictures, I set my Nikon D90 to ISO-800 and used a Nikkor 18-200 zoom lens with vibration reduction (handheld). One word of caution about higher ISO settings: you get a lot more grain in your image. But that is one of the compromises that you sometimes have to make. The feeder is located under a covered porch, so the lighting was indirect and diffused. I used an aperture-preferred setting at f/6.3 and the speed was between 1/100 second and 1/320 second for the various shots.

The beauty about digital photography is that you can take a lot of pictures and not worry about wasting film. I zipped off several dozen shots of these little birds to get a handful that were good quality. I processed the images with Photoshop CS5, but I could have gotten the same results with Photoshop Elements. The modifications were all custom (i.e., no “actions” run) and each image was cropped.