Costa Rica is famous for its hummingbirds for good reason. There are so many of them and they are so beautiful. Shutter speed has nothing to do with freezing the wings of hummers (which are beating about 80 times per second). The trick in photographing hummingbirds is to use flash where the power is lowered to 1/16th of full capacity. This, in turn, reduces the 'flash duration' -- the actual time the bulb inside the flash tube is on during the exposure -- to about 1/16,000th of a second. That freezes the wings so we can see all of the remarkable detail of these tiny birds. I use four strobes for each hummingbird setup plus a background photographic print of out of focus foliage. The soft green background is natural looking because hummers are diurnal. A black background would only be correct if they were nocturnal. My settings for this shot of a purple-throated mountain gem hummingbird were 1/200, f/14, 400 ISO, and I used a 70-200mm lens.
2 Comments
Jan 30, 2017, 9:57:54 AM
Jim - Bob, that's very strange. I'd never stay there again.
Jan 30, 2017, 8:08:34 AM
Bob - This is like studio photography. A beautiful place I visited in Ecuador prohibited use of flash photography. The reason was not the birds, they maintained the flash was a disturbance to all the other guests