From the Field

17 Feb 2002

Been practicing photographing hummingbirds between rain showers. (It is the wet season). Trying to learn how to shoot with the digital Olympus E10 camera as opposed to 35mm film cameras. Getting a good natural background is tough. Seems there is almost always a dark area where a wing or some body part disappears into nothingness. This is not a problem unique to digital cameras and also not to just hummingbird photos.

For years photographers have argued over the digital tweaking of images. With images shot with digital cameras there is a need to adjust digital "image levels" in almost every image. This is designed into the cameras by the manufacturers to allow better field performance and faster processing of images by the camera as they are taken.

The digital adjustment of the images is comparable to darkroom processing of film prints and is not "tweaking" or an alteration of the original image. However, the background of the above photo was "tweaked" using a digital blur filter. The image below is the original image with normal processing adjustments and the natural background, without the blur filter.

Now we are asking you to tell us which you like best and why. If you have an opinion about digitally altering a photograph we would like to hear it.

Please take a moment and email us your opinion. Just click here…
Here is my opinion!

The other day I photographed a hummingbird feeding on an orchid flower. It just so happened to be one of my favorite orchids, Galeandra pubicentrum. The hummingbird came to the flower; it hovered, and then went right in for nectar. I was delighted to see the bird feed on the flower as I had only thought he may hover by it for a shot or two. I was able to get only one image with the bird actually in the flower. He would zip in and zip out so fast that in a few seconds he was gone.

Sometimes digital enhancements can save a beautiful photograph. Although the flower of the orchid is not pure white, it is very light in color. The hummingbird is very dark in color. The proper exposure for the hummingbird would leave the flower totally overexposed, while the proper exposure for the flower would under expose the bird. I chose an exposure half way between both ends and got a flower that was to light and a bird that was to dark! Thanks to the digital darkroom I have in my laptop computer I was able to develop the image into a picture I really liked. Perhaps it is more art than photography…but then after all, photography is art with light as paint, isn’t it?