Last year, gg triggered my Jealousy-o-meter by getting some pictures of hummingbirds, putting my previous effort to shame. I plotted revenge in the form of a plan to get slo-mo footage and was thwarted, though I managed to get a hummingbird moth.

I now claim success. Mwuhahahaha.

On my recent vacation we were back at our old digs, where I had gotten the previous shots on my DLSR, and set up to use my Exilim high-speed camera (EX-FH20 model). We got a visitor within a day, and some more action over the course of the week. Mostly females, though it’s tough to say if it was just one repeatedly visiting or not, and I did spot a male, with its prominent red patch on his throat, on one or two occasions. After discovering that reaching for the camera and turning it on usually scared them away, I went for the option of mounting the camera on my Gorillapod and placing it on the table in front of me, requiring only a click to turn the camera on (it tended to shut off during the wait for a visit to the feeder). I also left it running while I stepped away, and then scanned the footage for evidence of a visit. The drawback of that option is that 5 minutes of elapsed time is more than an hour of footage at 420 fps, and almost three hours at 1000 fps. That’s a lot of data to sort through. The fixed targeting of a tripod caused some missed shots when the bird would hover about a foot away from the feeder, but the alternative was more missed shots. The difference between this and shots “in the wild” is that you know where the subject is going to be — at the feeder — and don’t have to track it as it flies. And you know it will be flying, unlike the many potential subjects who just sit there until you run out of patience and stop filming. That’s when they decide to jump or fly.

I got shots at both of the faster frame rates, along with some stills using the burst mode, which captures 40 frames in a second.

Here’s a sequence of stills from the burst mode, turned into a movie

Now we go to 420 fps

and finally, on to 1000 fps. This last movie is even better at showing the distinct change in the pitch of the wings as the bird moves away from the feeder, hovers, and then flies away. Which is pretty cool.

Note that all three movies should represent between a second or two or so of elapsed time. 420 fps = 14:1 and was 37 seconds long with some dead time at the end, and 1000 fps is 33.3:1, with a playback of 40 seconds. I slowed the frame rate of the stills down to 15 fps when I converted the sequence to a movie, to make it last longer than one second. Even so, the flap rate seems very slow for that sequence — I suppose it’s possible there’s aliasing going on, and/or my settings are different from what I thought they were. Other still sequences show more flapping. The sound they typically make jibes with what I get from the internets, that the beating is somewhere in the range of 20-200 Hz; it was this low-pitched fluttering that was my first indication that a visitor was nearby.

I did get many more shots, but uploading them to youtube is a bit of a pain — the upload generally craps out at least once, which makes me reluctant to try too many large files. I have had limited success with the java option which supposedly lets you restart a stalled upload (finally got the 420 fps movie shown here to upload; I had originally uploaded a shorter clip).

If you want to see how the pros do it, go here. Better shots, but they put in a whole lot more time and have better equipment at their disposal.

UPDATE (8/4): I have uploaded stills to flickr, and will probably add more later