Translucent wings

Toward the end of this month I'll be returning to Costa Rica to lead another photo tour there (it's sold out), and the focus is primarily on birds. We have a few sessions with hummingbirds which are amazing to photograph. I wanted to share this picture with you from the last time I was there because it's particularly unique. While I was shooting the birds as they came to one of my setups (a flower with artificial nectar placed in it), I noticed that the backlighting from the ambient daylight was beautiful and that the wings of the birds appeared to be translucent. So, I repositioned the flash units to produce the same kind of light -- but the flash duration of the strobes, and their light output, enabled my group to freeze the wings with enough depth of field so the entire bird was in focus. The power of the flash units was reduced to 1/16th power, and this made the flash duration -- the actual length of time the flash tube was illuminated during the exposure -- about 1/16,000th of a second. This is what froze the wings. My settings were 1/200 (to sync with the flash units), f/13, 400 ISO, and I used a 70-200mm zoom. The exposure was determined by trial and error, not by the meter. This is a green-crowned brilliant hummingbird.