Pinch me, I must be dreaming. That’s what I felt while I was in Costa Rica last week. Although I’ve been to Costa Rica three other times, the focus was on many birds, not Hummingbirds specifically. This visit was Hummingbird-centric. Hummers are near and dear to my heart and I photograph them in my own garden often. But, I had never seen, let alone photographed, any of the nine species I saw and photographed on this visit. I’ve already shared the gorgeous White-necked Jacobin and the elusive Snowcap. This is a male Green-breasted Mango whose breast actually appears blue to me with green on either side. But I don’t name these flying jewels, I just try to photograph them.
The lodge where we stayed had a deck from which we photographed Hummingbirds that came to the many feeders hanging around it. Getting flight shots was my goal. But the feeder is the last thing I want to see in a photograph of a flying Hummingbird. Sometimes it was very difficult to avoid getting parts of the feeder in the photograph because space on the deck was limited and there were several of us with our gear on tripods, so moving even a few inches from one side to the other to avoid it was not always possible. Fortunately, I figured out how to avoid getting the feeders in the photographs: don’t photograph near the feeders. Sounds logical but it wasn’t obvious to me at first. I decided to focus on a particular Mango on a natural perch affixed to the deck. I realized that he would regularly fly straight up from the perch, stop for a fraction of a second at eye level, and then fly to the feeder, returning within seconds to land on the same perch again. He repeated this over and over. Then it hit me what I needed to do. I positioned the lens with the top of his head at the bottom of the viewfinder so that if I reacted in time when he took off, I would capture him in the center of the frame. Et voilà! I was successful getting tack sharp flight images in 11 percent of the images I took using this technique, a technique I will repeat when I photograph Hummingbirds again. And, I was happy that I was not dreaming.
