Hummingbirds

I took those at the home of a friend who lives in the mountains and feeds some of the wildlife (not the bears and the mountain lions, though!) It was my first time photographing hummingbirds and it turned out to be as difficult as I thought it'd be. I had to bump the gain to ISO 1600 just to keep the shutter speed acceptable, which produced noisy images. I used the maximum aperture of my lens, but on second thought, I needed a bit more depth of field then half-a-bird. All the technical stuff was a huge challenge and I'll have to do a lot of reckoning if I want to give it a try again. But I'm mostly interested in your thoughts about the composition.

Is it too distracting to have the bird on the right out of focus or can I get away with it because the attention focus should be on the one on the left? Should I clone out the feeder and crop more tightly on the right side, or leave it for context?

Nice shots, Kamen! I think that some blur of the wings is perfectly acceptable and may be even preferable to show movement, much like rotor or prop blur for helicopters and airplanes. And ISO 1600 should be no problem with a 7D2. Nothing that a bit of post-processing cannot take care of.

Scrumhalf wrote in post #19557910
Nice shots, Kamen! I think that some blur of the wings is perfectly acceptable and may be even preferable to show movement, much like rotor or prop blur for helicopters and airplanes. And ISO 1600 should be no problem with a 7D2. Nothing that a bit of post-processing cannot take care of.

Thank you for the feedback and the encouragement!

twincitybulldog wrote in post #19557905

Hosted photo: posted by twincitybulldog in
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forum: Birds

Beautiful sharp shot!

Has there ever been a reasonable or acceptable theory/explanation for why one yard has territorial activity and another has the hummers flocking around the feeders? For 15 or so years I’ve always experienced the one bird being the bully over all. So extremely frustrating!! I’ve tried all I can think/heard of. Just asking. Thanks.

If it helps, in my particular case, there were 4-5 feeders, all around the house and yard, and maybe 30-40 birds feeding continually. Yes, three were plenty of tussles, as seen on the photos, but they weren't really that adversarial - the birds would scuffle a bit, but then both birds would feed side-by-side, sometimes with 4-5 birds simultaneously on the same feeder.

Kamen