Hunting For Nectar
This is a female Annas Hummingbird I photographed several weeks ago while practicing a new lighting setup that I have been working on for photographing these colorful hyperactive birds.The concept is to photograph the birds in the shade, using at least 5 strobes pointed at the bird, and one strobe pointed at the painted background. The goal is to provide even light on the bird, and a non distracting background.
I learned the lighting from a book by Linda Robbins called The Hummingbird Guide. Her method is to use a minimum 0f 5 to 6 strobes, a supplied background (which my wife painted), 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 durations which means it freezes the wing blur. I used 6 Yongnuo strobes because I wanted to use identical manual power output for each flash . 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 under 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 method is the only way that I've been able to photograph one of these birds with little, or no, wing blur. Down below in the first comment, you can see a picture of the setup that I used.
I've taken quite a few pictures of hummers over the years and put them an album creatively called Hummingbirds.
Hunting For Nectar
This is a female Annas Hummingbird I photographed several weeks ago while practicing a new lighting setup that I have been working on for photographing these colorful hyperactive birds.The concept is to photograph the birds in the shade, using at least 5 strobes pointed at the bird, and one strobe pointed at the painted background. The goal is to provide even light on the bird, and a non distracting background.
I learned the lighting from a book by Linda Robbins called The Hummingbird Guide. Her method is to use a minimum 0f 5 to 6 strobes, a supplied background (which my wife painted), 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 durations which means it freezes the wing blur. I used 6 Yongnuo strobes because I wanted to use identical manual power output for each flash . 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 under 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 method is the only way that I've been able to photograph one of these birds with little, or no, wing blur. Down below in the first comment, you can see a picture of the setup that I used.
I've taken quite a few pictures of hummers over the years and put them an album creatively called Hummingbirds.