Show me your Hummers In-flight with your R7

ThrillaMozilla wrote:

No R7 here, and no hummers for a few months. Besides, many of my hummer pictures are disappointingly fuzzy. Not sure why, yet.

How are you doing? Are you high and dry? Not flooded or covered in snow?

All good , TY 🙂 No flooding where we are at 👍

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.

Peter

well without even attempting to explain it…. Because I have no idea why it is, but I have one buddy who has taken a bunch of really nice shots of Hummers in flight, with the R7 in ES mode, and he tells me that it’s really just hit and miss, and that if takes a bunch of good bursts, he will almost always end up with several really nice shots, that don’t show much, if any shutter roll effects ?

Honestly, I like really good perched shots, as much, or more. I just asked about IF shots, because I know those would be most likely to show weaknesses of the R7…

These were taken with the R7, RF 100-500 using EFCS. These were taken last August, shortly after I picked up the R7. I used it along side the R5. Overall they were very comparable, but I do think the R5 nailed focus a bit more frequently. However that could have just been a by-product of me using the R5 for quite a bit longer at that point.

Here's a link to the album on my Flickr account

2022 Hummingbird Album

R7, RF 100-500, EFCS

JayLT4 wrote:

These were taken with the R7, RF 100-500 using EFCS. These were taken last August, shortly after I picked up the R7. I used it along side the R5. Overall they were very comparable, but I do think the R5 nailed focus a bit more frequently. However that could have just been a by-product of me using the R5 for quite a bit longer at that point.

Here's a link to the album on my Flickr account

2022 Hummingbird Album

R7, RF 100-500, EFCS

Okay, very nice. And this is really what I wanted to see.... Frozen wings, without any shutter roll.... Even though I think I've gotten to where I mostly like to see some wing blur... But from a slightly slower shutter, but still no shutter roll.

Honestly, I still don't think I've done any EFCS.... But it looks like I'm going to have to try some of this with the Hummers later this year 🙂

Thank you.

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.

ThrillaMozilla wrote:

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.

Are you questioning my veracity or my memory?

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.

itsallBb2me wrote:

Are you questioning my veracity or my memory?

No, not at all. And I just explained why it works.

I did accidentally leave that sentence in from a first draft, though, just in case, to make sure I didn't look like a fool.

Really nice pictures, by the way, and better than what I can get with ES, because my shutter is slower than yours.

ThrillaMozilla wrote:

itsallBb2me wrote:

Are you questioning my veracity or my memory?

No, not at all. And I just explained why it works.

I did accidentally leave that sentence in from a first draft, though, just in case, to make sure I didn't look like a fool.

Really nice pictures, by the way, and better than what I can get with ES, because my shutter is slower than yours.

Thanks for the explanation and the compliment. BTW, I didn’t mean to imply that there was no rolling shutter for hummer pictures using the R7. I got my share of those as well. Just didn’t save them.

I just upgraded to V1.3.0, (love doing it in-camera) but I doubt I will notice any difference in my shooting since I very rarely use the highest speed burst setting.

By the way, were those with eye focus?

ThrillaMozilla wrote:

By the way, were those with eye focus?

Yes. As I remember, the bird was perched on a feeder, and the camera was focused on his eye. When he took off, I initiated a high speed burst, and the focus stayed with the eye. Interestingly, when I review the photo, the red focus box is not on the eye, but where the eye was in the previous frame (see below). Obviously, the camera did not refocus on infinity, but instead remained with the eye, even though the red box was not recorded in that position.

itsallBb2me wrote:

ThrillaMozilla wrote:

By the way, were those with eye focus?

Yes. As I remember, the bird was perched on a feeder, and the camera was focused on his eye. When he took off, I initiated a high speed burst, and the focus stayed with the eye. Interestingly, when I review the photo, the red focus box is not on the eye, but where the eye was in the previous frame (see below). Obviously, the camera did not refocus on infinity, but instead remained with the eye, even though the red box was not recorded in that position.

Thanks.  I think that's typical.  It's kind of how my M6 II works also.