A Perverse Challenge
Photographing hummingbirds with a wide-angle lens
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A few months ago I was watching a YouTube video by a photographer I follow, Ben Staley. He’s a big fan of the Leica Q2, which is the camera I’m shooting with exclusively these days; his videos bolster my ongoing rationalization of the semi-absurd decision to go with a camera that is so incredibly limited in its functionality (but so amazingly good at what it does and how it feels).
The video in question documented a challenge he’d set himself, namely to photograph a bald eagle using the Q2. Photographers will immediately recognize this is as practically a self-dare: to use a wide angle lens where telephotos usually rule the roost, so to speak. Nevertheless he persisted, and the result was a pretty magnificent, expansive photograph of a bald eagle with outspread wings. Nice job Ben!
Now I don’t happen to have bald eagles in my immediate surrounds—I’d have to drive an hour to be close enough, and this sort of thing takes a bit of a stakeout, so what to do? I definitely wanted to take up the challenge myself, but working with what’s immediately available? Hmm… And (one more thing): I recently returned from a few weeks in Crete, with thousands of images to edit, but feeling a little overwhelmed and needing to put some distance between myself and the Crete work, so I can come back to it with fresh eyes… I needed some form of distraction, a buffer, if you will.
Which was staring me in the face: namely, we have hummingbird feeders, and the little critters are voracious at this time of the year. But if photographing bald eagles with the Q2 was challenging, pointing it at hummingbirds is downright perverse. How to capture their furtive arabesques, their surveillance hovering and their swooping attacks on rivals?
In other words, set to! Over a period of three days I shot upwards of 5,000 images (yes, you read that right), all big RAW files that took up over 500GB of memory! I waded thought these (I did them in waves) and then set about editing and working them up. Working this way, going back and forth between shooting and editing, allowed me to observe closely, to try and get into the strange, competitive, ruthless little reality that hummingbirds inhabit. Right now they’re stocking up with calories to carry them all the way to Costa Rica (it hardly seems possible!), feeding upwards of 14 times an hour—they’re going through over half a liter of sugar water a day at this point, and we only have about a dozen resident individuals!