Technologist Puts Angled Mirror Under Hummingbird Feeder And Spends Hours Recording Their Activity
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.
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“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:
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Wonderful thinking. These are amazing birds and are very fast. In the bird world they are most ferocious. They have been known to spear another bird with their beak in territory fights . They are stunningly beautiful. They can fly long range if necessary. Keep your feeders out well into the late fall for stragglers working their way south for the winter. Keep shooting that camera.
Thanks for writing about my image! Feel free to contact me directly if you would like additional images of the setup, images of other similar tests or for more details about the process. -Brian Maffitt
Wonderful thinking. These are amazing birds and are very fast. In the bird world they are most ferocious. They have been known to spear another bird with their beak in territory fights . They are stunningly beautiful. They can fly long range if necessary. Keep your feeders out well into the late fall for stragglers working their way south for the winter. Keep shooting that camera.
Thanks for writing about my image! Feel free to contact me directly if you would like additional images of the setup, images of other similar tests or for more details about the process. -Brian Maffitt
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