Hello and welcome to my attempt to describe how I photograph hummingbirds.

2017 Update: If you’re just interested in pretty photos, see “Arrival”

Many people look at my photographs and comment that I must have incredible patience. The secret, though, is just observing over the course of a few days which hours of the day the birds are focused more on the feeder than on foraging around in the flower beds or off eating bugs or raising babies.

I only have two species of hummingbirds at my house, Anna's Hummingbirds and Rufous, so their behaviors may differ from the varieties that visit your location. In any case, mine are regularly at the feeder an hour after the sun has risen high enough to warm them from their rest cycles, and about at dusk when they seem to be getting that last little bit of food to give them energy through the night. Both times are great times for photography because the light is changing quickly, the shadows are changing, the backdrops are changing, and so you get to earn your pay as a photographer trying to compensate for all of that all the while keeping an eye out for that incredibly short span of time when they're going to be in front of a camera.

Before we get into the photography specifics, I feel the need to share my philosophy on caring for these amazing creatures. First, I clean their feeders and change their food every three days, and more often in the heat of the summer. I'm aware of the debates people engage in about supplanting their natural food source with feeders and my experience has been that such concern is humans anthopomorphizing the behavior of wild animals: I see my hummingbirds feeding from flowers all the time, and, as you'll see below, consuming their recommended daily allowance of bugs. I use 1/4 cup of beet sugar mixed into 1 cup of boiling water as my ratio. I do not color the water. To clean my feeders I do not use any detergents or bleach, just hot tap water and a toothbrush reserved for just this purpose. I thoroughly brush-clean under running hot water every surface, nook and cranny of their feeders before refilling them with fresh sugar water. This is my practice. My birds range the neighborhood where there are other feeders out as well, and I can only hope they are as carefully maintained as mine. But this family of Anna's has wintered over now for multiple years, first just mom and pop and now junior as well, so I don't think I'm harming them. And the Rufous migrants come and go year after year, too. Maybe I have ratings on Yelp-Hummingbird.com

I call the method I work with the Box Model, because I'm trying to visualize where in space the focus box of my camera will be in relation to where the birds are likely to be. In this diagram you can see I have color-coded each camera to correspond with a focus box near the feeder.

While it's certainly not necessary to use three cameras, I often do, just to increase the chances that I'll get something useful each time my brain says "shoot now!"

So let's talk about the goal for each camera and it's placement. First, I'm always looking to get high quality photographs so the camera is placed so close to the intended focus box that I have to manually set the focus (on my gear, auto-focus always stops close focus a little farther out than the lens can actually focus -- and truthfully, autofocus is not going to keep up with these birds). The consequence, however, is that mirror slap and shutter noise scares the birds. So a lot of the prep work and trial and error is figuring out where the birds will head once scared away. I have a lot of, well, shall we say, rear-view shots of birds ducking for cover!

The red camera is my anchor camera. It will generally be set so that just the top of the feeder is in the bottom of the frame, and the hanging bar is on the left edge of the frame. My feeder hangs from a Tri-color European Beech tree, whose trunk is west of the feeder, so I most often have my gear to the east of the feeder. Here is a typical red camera anchor shot:

The blue camera is either going to catch an approach, a departure, or an altercation. With just a little bit of observation time you should notice about how far out the hummingbird pauses in-flight while assessing the safety of landing at the feeder, especially with all this black pointy gear surrounding his tranquil feeding space!

Here is a perfect example of the pause-on-approach that I love to capture:

The green camera is the just-in-case camera, for when my models aren't cooperating with the setting I have engineered for them and they go over to the tree. But sometimes they come at the feeder from the tree and this camera can capture that approach. This aphid-eating bird was captured by the green camera, as you can see the beech tree in the background:

Let's talk more about the setup I'm using to capture these images. Here's another view of the setup, in so far as I cared to model it in Blender 3D:

The gray flash units are either controlled by the camera they sit atop or by radio transcievers. (I was an early adopter of the Cactus V model when they were selling them for $50 a pair... I bought four pair!) As we all know, increasing the depth of field means shutting down the aperture, which results in less light reaching the sensor, so we're at the first trade-off: Sacrifice the size of the focus box due to lighting conditions and availability, or increase ISO with concomittant image quality degredation, or lengthen shutter time with reduction in sharpness of these incredibly fast birds. On a side note, I've video-recorded them at 240 frames per second and played that back at 30 frames per second and still been amazed at how fast and how far they move in between frames.

My general rule of thumb with the flash units is to expose properly for the existing lighting and use flash to give catch-lights in the eyes, illuminate the irridescent featherings, and sometimes to freeze the wings. I have never found enough sunlight to allow a shutter speed of 1/3500th and f/16, at least not at a useable ISO (and I can go up to ISO 25,600 on my Nikon D3).

In this shot of this visiting Rufous, I'm shooting at 1/3500th of a second to freeze the wings, and since that would be a pretty dark photo, I've added a flash off to the east in my setup. The wonderful consequence of that flash is that we see a semi-opaque shadow of the wing feathers on her body! But I'll also draw your attention to the depth of field in this shot: It extends from right about the crown of her head to just before the end of her tail, which you can see is starting to lose focus. That equates to a depth-of-field of about 3 inches -- there is not a lot of room for error in selecting your focus box, and why I prefer to have several cameras covering various depths.

Two flash units are my standard selection, with a third if I've got three cameras going. You can shoot with the flash on camera, but then you aren't as likely to get interesting shadow and relief. If you don't have wireless transcievers, you have two options that I know of: 1) You can cord your flash to the hotshoe of your camera, but be careful in how you arrange the tripod legs that hold the flash unit since the cord has a tendency to pull down and thus tip the tripod over; 2) If your camera has built-in flash that can command additional flash units with light emission, you can go that route. I've done this, but those pre-flashes can spook a hummingbird and even if they don't the additional delay in getting off the shot can mean an out-of-focus bird.

Here's an otherwise fine shot taken with only a single flash, but you see the shadow of the hanging pole on her left wing (right side in the image):

I have both read and heard that Rufous hummingbirds are the most aggressive. This came as a surprise to me as the family of Anna's that has been wintering over at my house for the last two winters (three years) are absolutely viscious in defending the feeders in my back yard. In fact, the male tends to oversee his domain most of the day, either from atop the hanger or from his preferred branch in the beech tree:

Best of all, as the summer nears its end and the hummingbirds are readying themselves for the long journey to their winter residencies, they tend to be more forgiving at the table so you have some opportunties to get full community groupings!

Finally, let's back up and talk through the use of all those radio triggers and flash units.

In the diagram, I have colored my radio triggers in both yellow and purple. The difference is a way in which I use different frequencies to manage the photography, lighting and timing. To be exact, I carry in my hand a transciever set to transmit on channel 6 -- it would in this diagram be a yellow-colored transciever. Other units, set to receive on channel 6, are connected to the wired trigger terminals on my Nikon bodies, so that they will all fire when I press my remote trigger. The proper setup has one transceiver, set to transmit on channel 7 (and colored purple here), set in the hotshoe of one of the cameras. Therefore, when that camera receives the signal to take a picture and it times its firing of the attached "flash" unit, a signal goes out over channel 7 to all the purple-colored receivers commanding their attached flashes to fire synchronized with the master. In the diagram I colored some of the flash-controlling transceivers yellow (channel 6) to set off light to the hummingbirds before the cameras are taking their pictures. If you have the equipment, I encourage you to play with variations on these setups as sometimes a drinking hummingbird will react to a preflash by looking up, or better yet hopping airborne just in case flight is called for. I've also set some of my flash units to repeating flash mode, so they fire many strobes in quick succession, which can sometimes be all the difference needed when one camera is slightly faster than others.

The fun in photographing hummingbirds is that the challenge can be overcome with outstanding results, and sometimes you'll see behavior that is too fleeting to be experienced by our eyeballs alone. So I'll close this out with three more pictures: The first just one of those perfect shots that upon closer examination require careful cropping because this hovering bird chose that instant to lighten its load before landing! The second and third are the result of trying to capture altercations, which are so difficult to capture both from a timing perspective and from the fact that the altercations almost always occur in flight zipping along, without the courtesy of remaining within your carefully architected focus boxes! If you've enjoyed these pictures and this discussion then my work here is done. You can see more (and even purchase prints etc.) at my Pixels.com store.

Okay, two more photos. The first did require tremendous patience because I set myself in a chair right at the feeder and held my iPhone 5 up poised to take a shot... and waited and waited and waited until my presence had been there so long they began to think I might not be a threat. But I still had to remain motionless as this Rufous began challenging me with dashing fly-bys, close hovers, and though I could not see it without turning my head I really think he hovered at my right ear (I could feel the air motion from his wings) examining my ear canal as if it were a tubular flower. But the mind-over-flee effort paid off as he landed at the feeder and gave me this intolerant look.

And lastly, explore other ways of taking their pictures. I experimented with a high mount, trying to catch them from a "bird's eye" view, but couldn't get many usable shots that way. So then I reconfigured one of my better tripods so that it was holding my camera down low, angled up to catch their underbellies. This did, of course, place my gear at risk of "lightening their load" manuevers, but none ever actually happened. This is one of my favorites from that investigation:

Thanks for stopping by! If you have any questions or comments, you can email me by using my first name, then the "at" symbol all email addresses contain, followed by my domain name minus the www.