Hummingbird in flight

I photographed this violet-crowned woodnymph hummingbird in Costa Rica. My setup for hummers is 3 flash units -- one on either side of the bird and one for the background. I use a 20 x 30 inch print of out of focus foliage in the background because otherwise the light falloff from the flashes would produce a black background. Since hummingbirds are diurnal, a black backdrop doesn't look biologically correct. I used a 70-200mm lens, and the settings were 1/160, f/32, and 1250 ISO. Note that no matter how small the lens aperture is, the background always stays out of focus. The sharpness of the bird is not determined by the shutter speed. Rather it is determined by the flash duration -- how long the light inside the flash is on. In this case, I lowered the flash output to 1/16th power, and this meant the flash duration was approximately 1/16,000th of a second. That also meant the flash units had to be very close to the flower. Here, it was 15 inches away. Amazingly, that doesn't seem to bother the birds.