I must admit, when I was out at the OSU Botanic Gardens recently to get some pictures of plants and flowers, I definitely did not have “green and purple hummingbird tree ornament” in mind as a possibility. And yet, here we are, and I could not be more pleased with this picture and how it all unfolded. I was walking through the gardens with my Nikon D750 and 105mm f/2.8 macro lens and, after photographing several different kinds of living things, decided to head to an area near the north end that usually has a collection of small trinkets, odds and ends, and figurines scattered (carefully placed?) about to give visitors a moment of whimsy and serendipity as they look at the flora throughout the area. On the ground were some painted rocks, a few seashells, a model house, and other such things, many of which would have been fun to photograph. But the thing that really caught my eye was the artificial avian friend you see above, and I knew it would make a great subject to capture with my camera.
The easiest choice I had to make was what to focus on, and as far as I was concerned there was just one answer: the eye. I suppose someone could get creative in a situation like this and think of something else that might make for an interesting image like, say, the beak or the spring or…well, I really don’t know. Because that’s not, as Dr. Alan Grant might say, what I would do. I’ll take the eye any day of the week and, much like Daniel Kaffee’s father, twice on Sundays.
The next choice was what angle from which to photograph the bird: straight on from the front? A profile shot from the side? How high or low should my point of view be? I settled on what you see here because it worked well to show the eye clear and sharp along with some depth of field with the beak and the tailfeathers just out of focus enough to make things interesting.
And that’s it, right? Just click the shutter a few times and then go about my day, eh? Well, maybe…except something else happened that I, like the One Ring when it was picked up by Bilbo, did not expect. The slightest whisper of wind wove its way through the clearing, causing the wing wheel in the foreground to spin ever so slightly. Fortunately my camera was in continuous high-speed shutter mode which meant I was able to get several shots while the wing rotated and, since I was using my customary Auto-ISO setting of 1/200 minimum shutter speed (along with an f/3.3 aperture which still gave me an ISO of 1100, which tells you a bit about how cloudy it was on this day), got just a bit of motion blur to add a sense of kinetic energy to what was otherwise a surprisingly static composition. I was not expecting that at all, and I’m so glad things turned out the way they did because the result exceeded any expectations I might have had. Between the light, the colors, and the motion blur, this might just be one of my favorite shots I have taken recently. Time will tell of course, but for now I can solidly say that, like Lloyd Christmas, I like it a lot.
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