My photographic adventure continues in Costa Rica. For a variety of reasons, this part of Central America is crazy rich with birds. Over 800 species either live permanently or visit the area during winter. This is about the same amount of bird species that inhabits all of North America crammed into one small Central American country.

The topography of this country is the key to the great avian diversity. Beautiful beaches on both the Pacific and Gulf side along with sea level jungles attracts many bird species. The central part of the country is mountainous. Starting at the bottom and working up, there are different species of birds. Mid way up the mountains is where widest variety of bird species occur. The tops of the mountains, known as the cloud forests because of its very constant cloud cover, is another group of high specialized birds.

This great diversity of birds is one of the main reasons I am here in the jungles battling biting insects, dodging venomous snakes and dealing with the heat and humidity. But more to the point, it is the hummingbirds that I seek. Costa Rica has over 50 species of hummers that call this place home. Compare that to the eastern half of the U.S. which only has one species and you start to see the value of this place.

Hummingbirds are only found in the New World, which means they are only found in North, Central and South America. When the first European settlers came to the New World they had never seen such a bird before.

Early this week I moved from the hot and humid low land jungles up to about 4,500 foot elevation. The temperatures cooled nicely and I could breathe again. I am here to photograph hummingbirds. For the next three days I will be sitting and waiting for hummers to come and visit me so I can capture some images.

As you can imagine, capturing images of hummers is not easy. They move so quickly. So to combat this I have set up five high speed flashes, all but one pointing directly at where I hope the hummingbirds will be. I have set up a flower as my attractant for the hummer. I outfitted my camera with a special lens which will allow me to closely focus on the bird. All of this takes about one hour to set up and refine all the details and settings.

The idea is, when the hummer comes around to visit the flower I depress the shutter release on the camera which opens up the camera, at the same time a transmitter sends out a signal to the five flashes which are set to slave mode and instantaneously all the flashes go off.

The trick is to freeze or stop action, the flapping of the wings. Because hummingbirds flap their wings around 200 times per second (not per minute) this can be a bit tricky. In order to do this either the camera has to be extremely fast or the flashes need to be extremely short and bright. Since the camera is mechanical, meaning it has many moving parts just to capture a image, by its very nature it is very slow. Light from the flashes on the other hand is extremely fast. In fact light travels faster than just about anything we know. So it is much easier to work with the light from the flash than it is to work with the mechanics of the camera.

To do this I have set my flashes to put out a tiny amount of light over a very short amount of time, such as a micro-second. So as the hummer approaches the flower I release my relatively slow camera, telling it to open up, then, bang, the flashes go off very quickly with a micro burst of intense light. At this time the shutter on the camera closes. The end results are it freezes the wings in place giving a pleasing picture of a hummer with its wings outstretched and frozen in time.

For three days I sat there waiting for hummers to pay me a visit and get their picture taken. This kind of patients and dedication is what is required to obtain these kinds of images. I was fortunate enough to capture many images. Some of the images had two and sometimes three hummers visiting my flowers at the same time. Over all I was thrilled with the results.

The only problem now is packing up all of this heavy photographic and flash equipment and hauling it back home. Oh yes, the hard life of a wildlife photographer. Until next time…

Stan Tekiela is an author / naturalist and wildlife photographer who travels the US to study and photograph wildlife. He can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.