Photography, Goldfinches

I think my new smokin deck will serve one of my other hobbies too, bird photography. It puts me closer to one of my hummingbird feeders. After lunch today I sat out for awhile trying for a hummingbird shot. I have an upside down thistle seed feeder for Goldfinch’s. They are the only bird that can hang upside down & eat. This makes them able to feed on some of their natural food like sunflowers. I have plenty of photos of them on the feeder & a few decent ones of them on sunflowers. At the corner of my house I have a bed of blackeyed suzans, cone flowers, that come up every year & the Goldfinches feed on them at times but could never get a good shot of them. While sitting there today I saw one on the cone flowers. I stood up slowly & shot 38 shots. 20 of them were good. I have an Olympus E620 & use a 50-300MM lens for my bird photos. It is a good lens for birds if I am close & there is a lot of sunshine. It doesn’t do too good in low light, at least for birds.
I found for the hummingbirds I could get the best photos using the sports mode, it gives me a low aperture & fast speed, which will at times be fast enough to stop the fast beating wings of a hummingbird, when they are in full back stroke or full forward stroke. Their little wings move fast enough you need a good strobe flash the stop them in mid stroke. This also gives me a shallow depth of field, the bird is in focus & background blurred so this works out good for other birds too. This is some of the best shots I have of a Goldfinch. They are starting to lose their summer yellow color. Photos were cropped & slightly enhanced using Photoshop Elements.