But for more interesting lighting, you'll want several flashes. You can start with one flash, if you can position it off your camera close to the bird. The equipment and subjects can differ, but light is light and the principles are the same. I learned a lot about lighting by reading books on studio portrait photography. One thing I realized is that this is essentially studio photography, but you're building a miniature studio outdoors. Over twenty years of high speed multiple flash hummingbird photography, I've developed a variety of lighting strategies. And the iridescence of hummingbirds can be somewhat challenging to light. This gives you a lot of control, and opportunity for creativity and experimentation but you're completely responsible for the lighting of the shot. Lighting is KeyĪs I said above, this type of photography works best when essentially all the light comes from the flashes, not the daylight. If not, part of the exposure would come from daylight, and this would produce ghosting, where a blurred natural light image is superimposed over the frozen motion from the flash, giving a sort of "double exposure." When properly controlled, this effect can look good but it's more complicated to get the exposures right, and simpler to set up so that all the light comes from the flashes. Also, to make this shot work, the total light from all the flashes must be a few stops brighter than daylight. You can then shoot at your camera's flash sync speed, usually 1/60 to 1/250 sec.Īt these low powers, the flashes must be placed within a few feet of the subject. These flashes reduce their power by cutting the duration of the already-short full-power flash burst (usually around 1/1,000 sec). You can get such short flash durations with a standard hotshoe flash, as long as it allows you to set a low manual power, like 1/16. But in reality, the trick is to use high-speed flash, so that it's really not the shutter speed that stops the motion, it's the 1/10,000 second flash burst. I'm often asked what shutter speed I use to freeze a hummingbird in flight. Here my group had a constant stream of colorful hummingbirds at their cameras. In our Ecuador Hummingbird photography workshops, we stay one week on the eastern slope at remote Guango Lodge, where sylphs and many other hummer species are common and used to feeders and people. To photograph them in flight, I set up feeders or flowers to attract them, and place several high speed flashes to illuminate the area where I expect they will feed, and wait. Hummingbirds are known for their ability to hover while flying, and their appetite for nectar and sugar water. I had to get a picture of this bird! Photographing hummingbirds in flight The Long-tailed Sylph occurs on both slopes but is more common in the east, which drains into the Amazon basin. The Andes, which reach over 20,000 feet (6,200 m) in Ecuador, bisect the country into eastern and western slopes, and each have their own resident bird species. The male Long-tailed Sylph can measure over 7 inches from the tip of its bill to the end of it's shimmering green tail. Four high-speed flash units at 1/16 power (1/10,000 second). Canon EOS 5D raw capture, EF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS-L lens at 135mm. A Long-tailed Sylph visits a Centropogon flower.
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