I photographed this hummingbird in Costa Rica. I'm posting it today because I saved the life of a similar-looking hummingbird in my garage this morning. It was struggling on the floor to fly -- I almost stepped on it. When I reached down to gently pick it up, I saw that one of its wings was inhibited by a single filament of spider web. Hummers are so light and delicate that they are prevented from flying by something as light a fragile as a spider web strand. I walked outside, and as soon as I removed the web filament, the little hummer took off. Made me feel good all day. For this picture, I used four flash units: one pointed to the photographic print background, two on the front of the bird and one providing a little backlighting. My settings were 1/200, f/14, and 250 ISO. The wings are frozen not because of the speed of the shutter, which would be much too slow, but because the power output was reduced to 1/16th power. This equated to a speed of about 1/16,000th of a second in terms of the flash duration. This is the actual amount of time the flash is on during the exposure.
0 Comments