Hello everyone.  Today, I’m going to write about photographing hummingbirds in Costa Rica.
About a year ago, I had the opportunity to take a work trip to Central America to help bring our San Jose team up to speed.  I extended my trip by a few days so I would have some time to see parts of the country.
One of the places I was able to visit was the La Paz Waterfall Gardens, which is about 2 hours outside of San Jose.  Among other things at this location is a Hummingbird Garden.  This only the second time I’ve had the opportunity to photograph hummingbirds.

These birds move quickly, much quicker than my autofocus was happy with.
Sometimes, I’d catch one just about right.

Although the background is really uninteresting.
However, I would frequently end up with the birds out of focus.

Sometimes, the birds would move out of frame giving me a fantastic photo of the feeder.

I even ended up with a silhouette.  I still like this photo, even if it is not my favorite from the day.

Eventually, my luck began to change and I started getting photos with birds that were both in focus and out of the shadows.

This photo in particular was just sitting on my drive.  I didn’t realize I had it until I started to prepare photos for this post.
I also caught this colorful fellow.

Then, I managed to capture my favorite.

This one is really nice.  It has 3 birds, but the 2 on the left are looking at each other.  One of them is a bit out of focus, but that’s fine, you can tell what it is.  The one bird is in perfect focus.  This was a really lucky shot.
Now that I have my favorite, it is time to start to work on it.  I shoot my photos in RAW, which means capturing the photo is really only the beginning.  Generally, there’s at least 30 more minutes of work behind every photo that gets shared.
For this photo, I decided that the best part was on the left, and I decided to crop it to a vertical.
After cropping, it was time to get the colors balanced the way I wanted, turn up the saturation, and balance the brightness to my liking.
The result is this:

And there it is, my finalized version of the photo.  I did turn up the saturation a little.  This was an item I debated for a while, but in the end, I’m happy with how it turned out.
-M