Hummingbirds consume almost half their weight in sugar every day to survive, and therefore prefer flowers whose nectar has a sugar content of 10% or more. Many people set up hummingbird feeders in their yards to observe and enjoy these tiny creatures, but Brian Maffitt, of Chestnut Ridge, New York, decided to take this a step further. He set up an angled mirror and used a camera to capture these birds in action.
“I sat on my patio and took a few hundred pics over several hours,” Maffitt writes on Reddit. “I had the camera locked down in manual mode, and used a cable remote to shoot bursts when they would show up to feed...It's a composite image of about 60 photographs...and I didn't overlap any of them when I composited them. It was just an artistic choice.”
The birds in the photos are mostly female Ruby-throated hummingbirds. Maffitt used Canon 5D Mk III at 1/4000/sec, f 5.6, using a Canon 100-400 zoom lens. The images were put together in Photoshop using approximately 70 layers, with a final file size of 3600 pixels by 11,000 pixels.
"I sat on my patio and took a few hundred pics over several hours. I had the camera locked down in manual mode, and used a cable remote to shoot bursts when they would show up to feed..."
This is what the setup looked like:
"When I was setting up the mirror it attracted some curious titmice"
Another example of a Photoshop file created to capture the motion of House Sparrows:
