Hummingbird outtakes

So sometimes when you’re blasting away at 8, 10 or 12 frames per second you get some oddballs in there. Shots that are maybe in focus, but with the bird doing something weird. Most of the time I can’t bring myself to delete them because HUMMINGBIRDS!

But what should I do with them? They aren’t the best or even decent. Thus the outtakes episode. Not a clip show. No. Not the good stuff, but the odd stuff. Like those photos you see when someone is caught blinking. Or talking. Frozen it just looks weird. So here are some shots that while funny, aren’t perfect. Minimal processing – viewer beware!

This first one is a female who looks to have a little bare patch from lining the nest for her little ones. The sacrifices to weatherproofness they make!

This young male gets his feathers ruffled. They create a pretty good downdraft with those tiny wings. Mostly this is an exercise in technique – to practice acquiring focus and tracking. The background is another of the pots so it went in the bin. But still funny as an outtake.

A classic eye-blink! And the wings are badly positioned – invisible on the far side and foreshortened on the near. Ugh. Funny though.

This next one shows (kinda) how the wings don’t flap like how most other birds fly, but twist in figure eight patterns in order to be able to hover. The far wing is twisting back and the near wing is twisting forward. It’s a female I believe and at the favorites. Clearly these have to stay on the menu forever.

This next one is an example of rolling shutter I think. As soon as this started happening a lot I switched to the mechanical shutter even though it was louder and took the birds a bit to get used to. At least I don’t have a mirror to slap around, too!

This next one might be the ultimate gaffe.

This next one is kind of terrible, but funny. A spray of pollen and check out the feet!

This one is a little harder to parse. Only when I started viewing some slow motion video I took did I realize this is a shot of one swallowing! Check out the throat bulge!

The poses they manage are sometimes so funny. I love the feet in this one and the seeming indecision –

I haven’t gotten a good shot of a tail flare yet. This is as close as I came –

So there are some not-so-great photos of the resident hummies in the yard. They will leave soon as of this writing, but I always look forward to their return in the spring.