Where Did That Feeder Go?
I photographed this gorgeous tiny terror at my sister's home back in April of 2016.  I had gone there to try a new method of photographing hummingbirds, in an effort to eliminate the blur from their wings, and it worked pretty well.  I've been photographing these birds for several years now, and I wanted to try and do it better.

Lighting stuff.  I used a six strobe setup to photograph this tiny terror.  I learned the lighting from a book by Linda Robbins called The Hummingbird Guide.   Her method is to use a minimum of 5 to 6 strobes, a supplied background (which you have to provide), and photograph the birds in the shade so that you don't have to overpower the sunlight.  When you use multiple strobes on a subject in the shade you can use lower power settings for each flash  which results in shorter flash duration which means it freezes the wing blur. I used 5 Yongnuo strobes and another 3rd party manual flash for a total of 6 strobes.  One strobe was pointed at the background, one was underneath the feeder, and the other 4 strobes surrounded the feeder.  The strobes were all at about 1/16th power, in manual mode, and were triggered by a Yongnuo RF-603N., and you can see the EXIF info on the side.  This is the only way I've ever been able to photograph one of these birds without wing blur. 

I've taken quite a few pictures of hummers over the years and put them an album creatively called Hummingbirds.
  <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/9422878@N08/sets/72157627149575339/">www.flickr.com/photos/9422878@N08/sets/72157627149575339/</a>

Other plants, flowers, fruit or stuff that I've photographed using strobes can be seen in my Strobe Lit Plant set. For each image in the set, and there are over 1500 of them,  I describe how I set up the lighting for that particular shot.  <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/9422878@N08/sets/72157628079460544/">www.flickr.com/photos/9422878@N08/sets/72157628079460544/</a>
calypteanna hummingbird hummer yongnuo yongnuorf603n manualflash bif birdinflight 6flashsetup backgroundlight tanbackground color colorful nature