Hummingbird Motion

by Mike Lee

Title

Hummingbird Motion

Artist

Mike Lee

Medium

Photograph - Digital Photography

Description

My lovely wife and I pretty much always put a hummingbird feeder out at a camp site when we set up. It's pretty amazing how fast the little critters sometimes find it; often the day we set up. This little female (rufous, I believe) found it the morning after I set up and hung around all 4 days I was at Gold Lake in Plumas County California.
I shot this frame while experimenting a bit with the electronic shutter on my newest camera which is a mirrorless body. Shooting fast moving subjects with the electronic shutter doesn't always work because of a phenomenon known as "rolling shutter." Basically, the camera is actually capturing multiple frames simultaneously. It does this by capturing one line at a time from top to bottom of the sensor very quickly, but not quite as quickly as the actual exposure time (in this case 1/800 of a second). Therefore, unlike the normal mechanical shutter that opens pretty much all at once, exposes all at once, and closes, movement happens as different parts of the frame are exposed. This is fine for stationary subjects but generally undesirable for fast moving subjects and can result in some really freaky distortion (I got a couple frames where the bird turned and it looked like a wing was detached from the body). However, in the case of a bird on the wing while straight at the camera it can result in some interesting motion blur like I think happened here.

Uploaded

September 4th, 2023

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