Booted Racket-tail

Sweet shot Ken, the pano crop works great here. I don't think I ever got this species that well on our trip. It was a lot of fun having you along and shooting with you. Thanks for your help on the trip.

I like the job with the flash. You must be very pleased. The comp is super too IMO.Sweet.

Dan

Nature has provided us with some real beauties and you sure got one here! Like the flowers and the bird; your comp is super. Must be tough getting all of this bird in and feathers turned for the viewer. Sharon

This is about as sweet as it gets Ken!
No nits here....a winner!

Very nice shot Ken, It's amazing the different varieties of hummingbirds they have down there which I just read is 130, and the tail makes this one a real standout. I like the pano crop and the wings-back capture presents a nice unobstructed view of this impressive looking bird. I'm a little curious about the high ISO setting you used because when I did this type of photography back in the film days I used very slow film speeds (usually Kadachrome 64 ) to try to show the finest detail in the feathers and have less grain in the photos. It might be differences in distance of the strobes from the birds and I guess aperture setting would be a factor as well. I don't remember what f/ stop I used. Again, nice shot!

Excellent! You got much better shots of these guys than I did!
Love his intent expression, the wing and tail position, and the pano crop works great here.
Sandy

Wonderful shot Ken. I like everything about this one.

Very nice Ken, the pano comp works well for this. Puts the hummers here in Texas to shame
I've never used the multi-flash setup. I have a friend who used the setup to shoot bats feeding on some desert flowers at night. He came away with some excellent results..
Well done

great bird, bg, and comp, Ken. really nice.

Simply superb - what I really like is the racket-tial feathers in a swaying position showing the movement

Awesome !!

Impressive shot ! Excellent !

Which is exposure time ?

Thanks and congrats.

Ciao, fabrizio.

Sweet image, Ken. Excellent job on the flash.

I thought I would jump in and answer some of the questions on this post because Ken hadn't responded and I led the photo tour.

Fabrizio, the shutter speed used was probably about 1/250 of a second. This is misleading because with the flashes firing at 1/8 speed and supplying most of the light the effective shutter speed is more like 1/5000.

Gary, we usually use a little bit higher iso than some people who do this type of photography. This is partly by design because we want to use less flash and just a touch of ambient light to make the images look more natural and less flat - which is often a criticism that some photographers make of high speed hummer photos. I've been told many times that my images and for example this one look more natural than most of the high speed flash photos out there. The Chestnut-breasted Coronet in my gallery placed in the NANPA Showcase for next year. If we used more flashes (we use 5 SB-26's and Linda Robbins for example uses 7) and/or positioned the flashes closer we could drop the iso more but the images would look flatter I think. The trade off is a little bit more noise in the images. I often run some noise reduction on the bg of these shots. I don't think Ken uses noise reduction (unless he has recently changed his processing) so 640 on the 40D looks very good here and that iso works well with my 1d MarkIII. Obviously, there's a huge difference in the amount of grain/noise that digital and film cameras produce and I wouldn't consider 640 a high iso but a medium one with those 2 cameras. For example the MarkIII is rated by www.dxomark.com to have good iso performance to iso 1000.

On the next tour I'll have Bill Forbes along as a co-leader who does a lot of high speed flash photography and he shoots at lower isos so we will have a couple of different setups going and learn some things from each other.

Hi Ken This is one marvelous pano crop superb color, detail , composition and control of flash setup
Albert Darmo. CAnada

What a gorgeous image
One to be proud of.

Geoff.

Thank you everyone for your encouraging comments about this photo.

Nate, I did answer Gary's and Fabrizio's questions through their e-mail links.

Ken