Show me your Hummers In-flight with your R7

Messier Object wrote:

ThrillaMozilla wrote:

itsallBb2me wrote:

Chris Wolfgram wrote:

itsallBb2me wrote:

Mechanical shutter ? I mean zero shutter roll, so I’d assume….

No, ES on both. Zero shutter roll for two reasons: no verticals in the background, and the birds were basically hovering. You get rolling shutter on a fast pan with a busy background. Quality fast pans with a hummer in full speed flight are few and far between.

No shutter roll because the wings are at their limits of travel. At the point when the wings are reversing direction, they are essentially not moving, or moving at relatively low speed. At any other position in their travel, electronic shutter can show extreme distortion of the wings.

That explanation doesn’t make much sense to me given the long read time of the sensor - the wings should have moved to a different position between start and end of the read cycle.

Hummingbird hovering wing flap rate is 10 to 80 per second and so even at the low end of that range the wings would have gone through 30% of a cycle during the 1/30 sec sensor readout.

Yes, and that 30%--or whatever the number is--happens at the time when the wings are moving at their slowest rate, when they are reversing direction. It's obvious from the pictures that the wings did not cover much of their travel range during the exposures. Because the birds are hovering, he wings are moving nearly horizontally in those pictures, and that also helps. All this assumes those really were with ES.

But let's look at it again.  In round numbers, assume the wingbeat is 50 Hz and shutter travel time is 0.03 sec.  0.03*1.5 = 1.5 wing cycles in a shutter cycle, so there's plenty of space for distorted wings.  I measured one of your pictures.  It appears to be cropped about two-fold.  The wing occupies about 20% of the cropped picture height, so 10% of the shutter cycle.  That means 0.15 wing cycle in the time that the shutter traverses the wing.  With luck, that could be as little as 0.075 in one direction and 0.075 in the other direction.  So maybe the wing traveled as little as 7.5% of its travel range while the shutter traversed the wing.  So luck can be with us when taking hummingbird pictures.

If you just take a burst (with ES), I'm sure you will find plenty of pictures where the wings are extremely distorted. It is better than one would expect, though.