Booted Racket-tail Hummingbird (male) with Bee

by Graeme Guy
(Singapore)

This image was taken in Late January 2010 at Tandayapa Lodge in the Andean mountains east of Quito. I was with 5 others in a group led by Linda Robbins who appropriately calls her company 'Hummingbird Addiction'. She and her assistant Rich truck in a lot of specialist flash equipment to catch the high speed action. It was somewhat lucky that the the hummer and the bee were both in the focal plane. Hummers do not like bees loitering around feeders and will often knock them away with their bills. The don't eat them because of size constraints but will feed on smaller gnats.

The equipment used was a Canon EOS1D Mk3 camera with a 500mm lens, f18 and 1/250 second mounted on a tripod with a Wimberley head. The exposure duration is actually controlled by the duration of the flashes which would be operating at around 1/20,000 second.