One of the challenges I set myself was to capture hummingbirds landing. It’s not a matter of just setting the camera to the highest frame rate and hope for the best, but an anticipation that the landing was going to occur. With the lens focused on the flower, and framed wide enough to capture the bird as it came in, I’d take my eye away from the viewfinder and look at the larger scene to spot a hummer coming in for a landing.
Since the birds are attracted to the photographic setup using a feeder, the images are predominantly side views of the hummingbird coming in to the feeding tube. I tried to be aware of the flight of the hummer and attempt to get some images with the birds in different attitudes.
Another technique that Greg Basco suggested is to use a longer flash duration to get a little blur in the fastest moving parts of the hummingbird, the tips of the wings. In one setup we set the flashes to 1/8 power which froze the image of most of the bird. These two images were taken at f25 and using multiple flashes as the main light. In another setup where full sunlight was lighting the bird and background, the camera was set for a longer exposure to let the moving parts blur quite a bit, and the light from the flashes freezing a portion of the bird that did not move much. This had a lower success rate. The last three images were take at 1/25 second and f8. You can see the amount of wing motion in that short amount of time.
