At this workshop in Arizona, we are doing two different types of bat setups. Last night we photographed bats that drink nectar from flowers. Tonight, we're photographing bats that come to a small, man-made pond to drink on the wing. For this picture, we prefocused on the flower using manual focus. Autofocus as well as image stabilization were turned off. We set our cameras to 30 second exposures and used locking cable releases. This made the cameras automatically expose for a half minute in the total darkness, and then this cycle repeated for several hours. We actually retired for the evening once this was set up, and the cameras continually took pictures as the scores of bats came to drink. The bats would break an electric beam which then triggered all three flash units. I suggested to the group they use f/22 for as much depth of field as possible, and we all used telephoto lenses in the 200 to 400mm range. My ISO was 800. The power setting on the flashes was reduced to 1/16th power, and this translated to an exposure time (i.e. the flash duration of the flash tube) of 1/16,000th of a second. That's why the extremely fast flying bat is sharp in this image.
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