 Good morning and welcome to another Riding Ends vlog. I got a nice dusting of snow last night. I thought I'd do something a little different. Well, I guess it's not that different, but it is for me. I don't often photograph hummingbirds in the snow. I did do a video this summer of my hummingbirds. But these are completely different. These are Anna's hummingbirds. And they winter here in my neighborhood. So I'm out trying to make some stock photography images of these hummingbirds. And I thought, well, I think I'd do a video while I'm doing it. It should be kind of fun. We've got one right here on a branch just over my shoulder. So let's see what we can come up with. If you can hear that, there's a buzzing all around me. We've got quite a few here. We keep feeders out in the winter. Now that we've figured out that hummingbirds are really relying heavily on our feeders in this area. So we got down to 22 last night. So I brought the feeders in and then got up well before it got light out and put the feeders back out for them so they weren't frozen. So when it became first light, they could take advantage of it. I started out using a monopod to be a little more agile, a little bit more mobile. And now I've gone to using this tripod because there seem to be landing on the same branch quite a bit. So it's making it pretty easy to be a little more stationary. This is so cool. I don't know how usable these images are going to be. I don't know if there's really a market for hummingbirds in the snow, but it's a lot of fun making them. I wanted to make sure I got out here in time to get images and video clips while they're still in the branches. As things start warming up a little bit, the snow is going to start falling and it won't look nearly as cool. These guys are just all over the place. They are so active this morning. We've got males and females. I'm really looking forward to spring to see what kind of nesting is going to be going on. Hopefully we get a lot of babies. That might be kind of fun to photograph, too. I was out here earlier and I've been kind of giving them breaks. I come out for a little while, take a few images, and then I go in the house for a while and kind of let them do what they want to do and then come back out. But they really, as you can see, they're very tolerant of me being out here. That's probably because I'm out here all the time and they kind of know who I am. I don't really feel like I'm stressing them out at all. He might be giving me grief. The lens is focused about as close as it can go. I'm using a 400mm. It's an old lens, super light. That's why I saw a tripod because it just shakes so much when I'm using it. If I continue to do this kind of photography, I definitely want to pick up something a little more higher-end. For where I'm doing, at least for the video clips, this should work pretty good. Getting some pretty nice, close stuff. He really doesn't care that I'm here. He's more worried about this other male that's flying around. They've been going at each other all morning. I wish all of my photography was this easy to get close to the subject. My photos are pretending to be pretty similar. I'm not going to get a lot of variety here. But I am enjoying the close proximity of my subject. When I'm shooting video on these DSLRs, I find that my little makeshift loop rubber band contraption. I know they make stuff for this. I just don't have anything because I don't do this very often. With this little contraption I've got set up here. It focuses on the LCD screen on the back. It works pretty well. It's a little harder for things that are moving pretty quickly. I've shot birds in flight. I've shot hummingbirds in flight with this technique. It's a little harder. Your keeper rate is quite a bit lower. But it works pretty well when you're in a pinch because these don't autofocus at all when shooting video. But the video quality is easily pretty good if you can get it in focus. You might give this a try. It's just a little low power loop. You don't need a lot of magnification. This loop that I'm using is a four times power loop which seems to work pretty well. It magnifies it enough that you can see what's going on. Any more than that you're just going to be focusing on dots. You're not really going to see the image that you're trying to focus that much. I wouldn't put anything a whole lot more powerful than that on here. When I'm doing stills I just use the regular refinder. I've been using manual focus and autofocus both on these images. My apertures have been ranging from about... I'm trying to stay around F8. This is a 5.6 lens so I'm shooting about F8, F11 in there somewhere. But when you're close to something at that depth of field is really shallow. You don't really need 2.8 or anything like that because I'm only a few feet from the subject. By shooting from farther away the background would be pretty busy. But I think the shots that I'm getting here are actually pretty nice. Getting enough depth of field to see that we're in the snow. But the background shouldn't be too cluttered. The subject should stand out pretty good against the background. The lens is coming out and the snow is melting out of the trees. So I think I'm going to end this video right here. Until next time, thanks for coming along for the ride.