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    Triumph!
    by Ann


    A few weeks ago, I went to a bird photography workshop given by the Museum of Natural History here in San Diego. I spent a 12 hour day taking pictures of ducks, and decided that specializing in bird photography probably wasn’t my thing. But during one of the breaks in the action, someone asked the instructor about the stop motion hummingbird pictures on his website, and he gave a short explanation of how it’s done. Apparently this is fairly common knowledge among bird photographers, so I’m not really giving away any secrets.

    Hummingbirds flap their wings at about 80 times per second. To freeze the motion, the exposure duration needs to be somewhere around 1/10,000 of a second. Just setting a fast shutter speed is not going to work. The alternative is to use high-speed flash.

    At full power, small, hotshoe mounted flashes flash for about 1/1,000 of a second, which is still too long to freeze hummingbird action. But the way they reduce their power is by reducing the duration of the flash. At 1/32 power, the flash duration will be about 1/10,000 of a second, which is fast enough to stop the wings. 1/32 power is also not much light. But multiple flashes, fired close to the bird, will do the trick.

    So much for the theory. On to the action.

    The first step was to get a hummingbird. I’d seen hummingbirds in my yard, so during the week after the bird photography workshop, I went out and bought a hummingbird feeder, filled it up with the right mix of sugar water, and hung it under the mulberry tree in the backyard. I chose the mulberry tree because underneath the tree is deep shade and it was dark enough that I could light the bird entirely with flashes. The downside of putting the feeder under the mulberry tree is that I couldn’t see it from the house, and I had no idea if any birds were actually finding it.

    A couple of weeks later, the stop motion challenge came up, and I decided to give it a try. I used masking tape to seal off all but one of the openings on the hummingbird feeder, so I could predict where the bird was going to go to feed.

    I didn’t really do all of the next steps in the logical order they’re laid out here, there was a bit of trial and error, but the story is much easier to understand if I cut to the chase.

    I set the camera on a tripod, about ten feet away, and at the same height as the feeder. I used my 80-200 f/2.8 at 200mm (the longest lens I own, without resorting to teleconverters). With birds, it’s easiest to set the camera up at a feeder, and wait for the bird to come. I aimed the camera so that I could get a small bit of the feeder into an edge of the shot, with the idea of cropping it later. I set the camera to manual focus, and prefocused on the feeder.

    At this point, before the lights were set up, my goal was to set the exposure set so that the area next to the feeder was in total darkness, and the background (not under the tree) was properly lit. This way, all the light on the bird would have to come from the flashes. I didn’t have enough flashes to light the background, so I was relying on the sun for this. I set the camera to manual exposure, took some test shots of my hand at the feeder, and adjusted aperture and shutter speed until the background had some light, but my hand was in the dark.1/500 is the max sync speed on my D70, so I started there, and just adjusted the aperture until I had what I wanted. I ended up with ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/500.

    I had three Nikon speedlights and a cheap eBay wireless transmitter and receivers, so I could fire all three flashes wirelessly. All the flashes were set in manual mode to 1/32 power. If all the flashes are at the same brightness, the closest one to the subject will be the brightest, so I used distance rather than flash power to control and balance the light on the bird. I set up the main flash at about two feet above and in front of the left side of the feeder, to light the front side of the bird. A second flash went a bit further away to the right of the bird, to light his backside, and the third flash went even further away, in front and below the bird, to light the iridescent throat. It was a struggle to get the throat lit evenly with the rest of the bird, because of the shininess of the throat. I didn’t totally succeed, and ended up fixing it later in Photoshop.

    Once I had the strobes set up, I took some pictures of my hand again, and started adjusting flashes and exposure settings. The basic rule of thumb when balancing ambient and flash is that the shutter speed controls the amount of ambient light, and the aperture controls the brightness of the flash. I ended up going to f/8, because the strobes were too bright. This also dropped the light on the background a stop, but the sun was starting to come out, so this was okay.

    Then I got a cup of coffee and waited for a hummingbird to come.

    After a couple of cups of coffee, a bird turned up. Being jittery from the coffee, I moved too fast, and it flew away. A few minutes later, it came back, and I moved slowly enough to get some shots. Promising, but there was lots of wing movement in the shot, and the bird wasn’t really in focus. There were two problems. First, I didn’t have enough depth of field. Adjusting the aperture to f/11 fixed that problem. Second, the sun had come out while I was waiting, and too much ambient light was getting in under the tree. I needed to drop the ambient light enough so that the bird was actually in the dark without the flash. After some experimentation, I found that f/11, 1/500, and throwing a black sheet over the white concrete sidewalk dropped the ambient light enough to stop the movement, but still left me enough ambient light so that the background was lit. I had to move the strobes really close to the bird to get the bird bright enough.

    Out of the camera

    After editing

    Lessons learned:

    I only had one hummingbird using the feeder, but one was enough. He came back to the feeder every 10 or 15 minutes, which was just enough time to go inside to check my shots, make adjustments to my setup, and settle in again. As it was, it still took about four hours and 200 shots to get everything right.

    My shiny white hand was a lousy standin for a hummingbird. It was much brighter and more reflective than a hummingbird. I’d wear a glove or use a stuffed animal next time.

    If I were to do it again, I’d find a way to soften the light on the bird. The light that the bare strobes put out was pretty hard. Since softening the light will also reduce the light, I’ll need an extra strobe or two.

    Even with the strobes set at 1/32 power, about half of the shots had some wing movement, so anything more than 1/32 power isn’t going to freeze a hummingbird at all.

    In the workshop, the instructor suggested six strobes, four to light the bird, and two for the background. He was right. The biggest struggle I had was knocking down the ambient enough to freeze the bird without background going totally black. Too much ambient light on the background made some strange shadows on the picture. Flash on the background would work better.




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