Monday Hummingbird Blogging

I recently purchased an Olympus 40-150mm zoom lens; in 35mm terms, this translates to a range of 80-300.

Although by modern standards the lens is not anything to particularly brag about (and, in fact, is sold with Olympus cameras as one of their inexpensive “kit” lens) still, it has by far the most “reach” of any lens I’ve ever had. So this is something new for me, and being something new, is requiring trial and error experimentation.

One thing is clear: a high shutter speed is required, not so much as to capture moving subjects as to eliminate camera shake. For this hummingbird shot in my front yard I used ISO 400 combined with a shutter speed of 1/400th second.

As an aside, you would think that there are enough Mexican Bush Sage plants in the front to feed an army of hummingbirds. But no. Our front yard serenity is regularly interrupted by frenzied Hummingbird Wars: aerial acrobatic combat featuring charges and counter charges. Someday somebody is going to get hurt.

Photo: Hummingbird—Marin County, 2009