Hummingbird photography

I love this shot of a green-crowned brilliant hummingbird because we can see the translucency of the wings. I never knew some birds had wings like this. That's one of the amazing things about action photography -- we can see things impossible to observe with the naked eye. I captured this image in Costa Rica. My hummingbird setup is this: I use four flash units (three on the bird and one on the 20x30 inch print background of out of focus foliage that's mounted on foam core), a 100-400mm zoom lens for flexibility in composition, a shutter speed of 1/250 (the typical sync speed), f/16, and usually 640 ISO. All four flashes must be the same brand and model number or ghosting can occur. The exposure mode on the camera is set to manual. The recycle time is virtually instantaneous because the flash output power is reduced to 1/16th. This means the flash duration -- the actual length of time the light inside the flash is on -- is about 1/16,000th of a second. That freezes the wings so they are tack sharp. The exposure can be tweaked by placing the flash units at varying distances from the flower setup. Most of the time, the flashes (on light stands) were about 15 inches away. To attract the hummers to the flower, I use a syringe to put sugar water (simulating nectar) in the flower. The bee in this shot enjoying some of the nectar was a bonus.