Probably a good explanation for this...

[Jonathan Levin]

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Hi All.

I am wondering why on most of the photos I shot of a Hummingbird have this strange artifact. It's not in the same place in each photo.

SL3 with 24-90

ISO 5000

Shutter: 16000

I'm guessing this has something to do with the shutter switching to electronic??? I was trying to freeze the wings of HBird, which I learned is not easy. Anything I could do differently in the future to prevent this?  Some of this I can likely remove in post. Thanks.

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[Filip Baraka]

Shutter roll, exaggerated by electronic shutter…

[SolarChronicle]

Switch to mechical shutter. I think it tops out at 1/8000"?

But why freeze the wings anway? It looks more natural to include motion blur. I usually set my shutter speed to 1/125" or 1/160" for a natural look.

Edited August 11 by SolarChronicle

[Jonathan Levin]

1 hour ago, SolarChronicle said:

Switch to mechical shutter. I think it tops out at 1/8000"?

But why freeze the wings anway? It looks more natural to include motion blur. I usually set my shutter speed to 1/125" or 1/160" for a natural look.

I got bunch with varying shutter speeds, but my preference in edit was the higher ss examples.

[LocalHero1953]

You are using the electronic shutter, which reads the scene line by line: each line is read quickly, but it takes around 1/30s to read the whole scene. By which time your humming bird has moved from the upper lines to the lower lines.

It's like the old school panoramic photo trick where the smart-ass stands at the start of a line then, as the camera passes him, runs around the back to be included at the end of the llne. 

Solution: use the mechanical shutter. It actually shoots the whole scene quicker, whatever the shutter dial says.

[Stuart Richardson]

If you have a time machine you could show this to Eadward Muybridge and he would be very confused…

(He pioneered animal and human motion studies with early cameras. People did not fully understand how animals moved before photography allowed us to image it. For example, they thought horses always had one foot on the ground, which is not the case). 
 

If you want to fully stop the wing the best bet is a good flash. Flashes can have extremely short exposure times (1/50,000th etc). If you balance for the background, it can still look fairly natural. Just make sure you use the manual shutter and are at or below the sync speed. 

[Jean-Michel]

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For a fairly simple comparison of electronic vs mechanical shutter you can view" 

Te electronic shutter may well give a very short exposure (or long) for each line of pixels, but it still takes the camera a fairly 'long' time to read out all the lines, maybe as long as 1/30 of a second. With fast moving objects you get the 'rolling shutter' effect.

You can also get a distortion, but not image splitting, when using a focal plane shutter, as the resulting slit between the two curtains travel horizontally, such as in a M film body, or vertically as in digital M bodies.

A leaf shutter makes fo no distortion but exposure times cannot be as short as this of focal plane shutters.

Electronic global shutters, once perfected, may solve all those issues. 

 

 

Edited August 12 by Jean-Michel
typo

[Luke_Miller]

The electronic shutter in Nikon's Z8 and Z9 cameras go a long way in resolving the issue.  Their read out is 1/250th of a second. No mechanical shutter is installed..

[Jean-Michel]

Roughly, the readout time (time to refresh the sensor) for the SL2 is about 1/30 seconds; for the SL3 it is about 1/15 seconds, so twice as long! But it is much shorter for the SL3S, about 1/60 seconds. Using the electronic shutter on the SL3 for fast moving subjects is probably not the best idea.

With my SL2, I do not use the electronic shutter, except when using a newly acquired 100-400 lens (Sigma)

[Jonathan Levin]

Thank you all! This is fascinating. Yes, flash. And channel my inner Harold Edgerton!

All this makes sense now. So top mechanical speed is 8000? I’ll have to see if there is a way to only use mechanical shutter. I think I got caught in a moment of “holy shit, this camera has a top shutter speed of 16000!” Another thing I noticed as I was shooting this scene was the lack of a shutter activation sound. I figured something was up.

now I just need to find some hummingbirds to do this again. Thanks for all the good info. Jonathan

[MikeZ]

You can set the shutter type (mechanical, electronic or hybrid) through "Shutter Type" on the main menu.  Hope that helps.

[graeme_clarke]

...and you can set the camera to create a clicking/ticking noise for the electronic shutter...