Head on shot: male Anna’s Hummingbird, Sony 15mm f1.4 @ f2.0, 1/800s, ISO 400, camera controlled by Sony Creator’s App.

For years, I have captured backyard flight shots of our year-round resident Anna’s Hummingbirds. My strategy was always to remove our three-hole perching feeder, and replace it with a single-hole vertical tube that forced the birds to hover. With my 500 f4 (and extension tube for close focus), I would photograph the tiny birds from seven or eight feet away. Most of the resulting images ended up birds in profile, and, for the male Anna’s, a dull flat black would display instead of their trademark, iridescent gorget.

With a new idea this fall, I instead filled a small, red, empty spice container with 1:4 ratio sugar-water and attached it to the top of a scrap wood stick (a square dowel, construction stake or anything of suitable height would do the support work). I snapped off the spice cap, revealing five holes. When boss hummer discovered it, I removed the perching feeder and shot while seated nearby with my 300mm f2.8 lens. Now whenever the bird paused while feeding, it would face me straight on or with just a slight turn of head. Success!

Quickly, though, I considered using the Sony Creator’s App to control a wide-angle lens, with the camera set-up on a tripod mounted close. My 15mm f1.4 lens made this particularly appealing, i.e. lots of light. After set-up and linking of camera with smartphone, I tried mechanical shutter. It drove off a visiting bird like a shotgun blast.

No worriesꟷelectronic shutter rescue! Phone control then worked as hoped, and I got lots of sharp eyes employing bird eye focus w/tracking, with me comfortably standing or sitting behind our deck’s sliding glass door.

The changing season brought mornings with sunlight streaming thru a neighbor’s Douglas Fir tree, back-lighting the scene. This frequently caused difficult-to-block lens flare, but often it delivered wonderous light. I shot the wide-angle images mostly at f2 with my 15mm lens, ISO 200 to 800 and shutter speeds 1/250s to 1/1600s.

The A6700’s electronic shutter (15ms readout compressed RAW) occasionally created weird wing-shapes. Odd pics aside, though, I like the blurred wings, which generally have a look and feel much like what we see with our own eyes when viewing a hovering hummer up close. Our eyes, like most camera settings, can’t freeze rapid wing-beats. As well, the wing blur implies action, not a bad thing for a small flying bird.

Regardless of lens choice, 300mm or 15mm, this spice-container set-up fostered straight-on shots; every shoot I sorted many images with appealing head angles.

Note: When shooting with the wide-angle/smartphone app control, I would sometimes lose focus to the background, especially as the bird exited the feeder, and I wasn’t quick enough to stop shooting. If this happened, I stepped outside and manually re-set focus, ready for the next encounter.

Gary
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