This is a green crowned brilliant hummingbird I photographed in Costa Rica. In order to freeze the wings of hummers, you have to use flash. In this case, there were four flash units. All of them were turned down to 1/16th power because that made the flash duration -- the actual length of time the flash tube is on during the exposure -- about 16,000th of a second. This brief exposure time from the flash replaced the necessity of a super fast shutter to freeze the wings. To compensate for the light loss, the flash units are placed very close to the flower. The flash-subject distance was about 15 inches. To prevent the background from going black, which it would when exposing for the bird and the flower, a print of out of focus foliage is positioned about two feet behind the setup. One of the four flash units illuminates the print. Because the power of the flash is reduced so much, the recycle time between shots is virtually immediate. You can fire the camera as fast as your finger can press the shutter and the flash is always ready to fire -- assuming you're using fresh batteries. My settings for this image were 1/200, f/16, and 250 ISO. I squirted nectar, i.e. sugar water, into the trough of the flower petal to attract the hummingbirds.
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