The Importance of Color: Lessons for hummingbirds

As a wildlife photographer at large on planet Earth, I spend a lot of time thinking about color. I guess this makes sense. Color is nothing more than wavelengths of light. As photographers, what more are we than students of light?

Yet, despite the predominance of color in my world, my thinking, and my choice of occupation, all of it is completely subjective.

Peering out at the world through our primate eyes, most of us are graced with three different “types” of cones that are capable of receiving and transmitting three different colors. Much like our cameras, our eyes see red, green, and blue. These are what we call additive colors. That means I can take various amounts of these colors, a bit of this and a bit of that, to create every color imaginable. This translates to about one million different hues of color that most of us can see. And yet, what you and I are capable of experiencing doesn’t come close to the full spectrum of color that other species experience.

Us humans are what we call trichromats. This means we see those three basic colors mentioned above. Other species, especially birds, are tetrachromats. This means their eyes are capable of perceiving four different basic colors. And that one extra type of cone in the retina of their eyes extrapolates the rich tapestry of their world to roughly one hundred million different colors.

I can’t even imagine.

To birds, color is of the upmost importance. For some it’s camouflage. For others it’s used to attract a mate. And in the world of hummingbirds, it’s also a battle cry.

Anyone who has spent time watching hummingbirds around a feeder in their backyard has witnessed the sudden flash of color from a territorial or aggressive individual. The color is electric, as if a photographer cranked up the saturation beyond believability. And most photographers who have worked with hummingbirds find themselves at some point questioning if people are going to even believe the colors in their photographs simply because they fall so far outside of the realm of what our eyes and brains are used to seeing in the natural world. Such color in our world, it would seem, is reserved only for the neon signs beckoning us into the darkness of places we are probably better off not going.

A hummingbird’s ability to light up the visual field of an onlooker is a stroke of evolutionary genius because it happens on demand. Sort of like cephalopods, hummingbirds decide when to “express themselves.” When they want concealment, they have it; blending in perfectly to their natural environment or flashing electric colors as needed.

It’s no surprise that males of every species live shorter lives than females. Us guys, be it hummingbirds or humans, exist in a world of competition for the attention and acceptance of women. And getting someone’s attention often comes with great risks.

Some animals are what you might call tournament species; males fight for the right to breed, often sustaining mortal wounds in the process that kill them slowly over the coming months. Other species are known for handing off a can of beer to someone and shouting, “hey y’all watch this” as they proceed to do a backflip off the roof a single wide trailer in hopes of winning the favor of the opposite sex. For birds however, gaining the attention of the ladies comes in the form of color, song, and dancing. But the females of a species are not the only ones watching. Predators must eat as well. And while making noise, dancing around, and flashing your fancy colors is what it takes to continue your genetic line out there, it’s also a great way to find yourself in someone’s belly.

Hummingbirds manage to sidestep the inherent problem with color in the wild thanks to the fact that their feathers aren’t really any of those colors you see. The red of a northern cardinal, for instance, is created from the pigment in their feathers that absorb all colors of the visible spectrum of light except for red which gets reflected back at us. The little colibri, as hummingbirds are known across Latin America, do it differently. Instead of wasting precious energy on pigments like the cardinal, hummingbirds manufacture their displays of color by refracting light from special plates of feathers. Refraction is essentially bending light. And when you look closely at a hummingbird, you will notice their feathers are arranged in layer upon layer of disk-shaped clumps sort of like stacks of pancakes.

Thanks to the unique feather structure of these disks, hummingbirds are able to bend light waves and flash colors that exist nowhere else in the living world, creating electric blues and a kaleidoscope of iridescence, purples and emerald greens – all on demand. In fact, according to researchers from Yale University, the diversity of colors in hummingbirds exceeds that of all other species of birds in the world COMBINED. And all of it is created by refracting light.

Because of the ways in which hummingbirds bend light to create their explosions of color, flash photography, in my opinion, is an important component to how I photograph them.

In the last article I sent out before ascending back into the cloud forest (I’m still in Panama), I discussed the use of multi-flash setups for the purpose of capturing hummingbirds in flight. With this technique, we can create striking images of these birds thanks to how flash duration works. But using flash isn’t just about being able to freeze frame our subjects. Sometimes it’s just all about color.

With this photograph of a fiery-throated hummingbird, endemic to the Talamanca Mountains that span Costa Rica and western Panama, I used two separate off-camera flashes. One was positioned as my “key light.” The other as fill flash.

With off-camera flash, a key light is the primary light used to light the subject. This was arranged at an angle about 45 degrees from me to the bird and at about 45 degrees angled down toward the bird. I like to have my key light pointing down at the subject for one simple reason: on planet Earth, light comes from above.

The fill flash functions to add a kiss of light into the shadows of the bird created from the key light. With hummingbirds though, this also plays double duty to help ensure we capture the magnificent colors of their display by enveloping them in light for their feathers to refract.

The key light is placed as close as possible to the subject. The reason for this is that the closer the flash is, the softer the transition between light and shadow on the subject which creates an almost three-dimensional effect. In this instance, the flash was placed above the fiddlehead of a fern that this fiery-throated hummingbird, and other species, were using to perch again and again. The fill flash was then placed about twice that distance away but also at a 45-degree angle from me to the subject. Both flashes were adorned with soft boxes. And since all wildlife photographers are gearheads at heart: when traveling, hiking, expeditioning, I prefer to carry Godox flashes and 26-inch Westcott Octo Rapid Boxes.

I should probably clarify something here because there is often a lot of confusion about this. Soft light, the kind of light that sort of wraps around a subject, is relative to the size of the light source compared to the subject that is being illuminated. We use soft boxes to create a physically larger light source than our bare flash for this reason. The bigger the soft box, the larger the light source, the more feathered the transition between light and shadows. This is why I like to use the 26-inch Rapid Boxes with small subjects like hummingbirds and tree frogs. These animals are very small compared to these larger soft boxes. Now add to this the fact that the closer the light source is, the larger it is proportionally to the subject, and the softer and more feathered the light will be as well.

Consider the sun.

The sun is so large you could fit over 100 planet Earths inside of it. Yet, because it’s 93 million miles away, it’s nothing more than a small disk in the sky. At noon, on a cloudless day, we have harsh shadows and highlights that sends most self-respecting wildlife photographers packing for the day as a result of this distance. Small bright sun in the sky makes for harsh contrast.

All of this changes dramatically when a layer of clouds is added to the equation. We don’t talk about clouds being so may miles high. Instead, the distance of clouds from the ground is measured in feet. These clouds act like a giant soft box in front of the sun with a small point source of light much like a flash (the sun 93 million miles away) combined with a large diffuser (spreader) that is so close to us it takes up the entire sky from horizon to horizon.

We all know the results.

Overcast days allow us to photograph all day. Light is diffused (spread) and the presence of shadows is greatly reduced. We can photograph in places we couldn’t otherwise, such as forests, because the light is soft and the transition between highlights and shadows is so feathered.

So, the closer the light source is to the subject, the larger it is physically in proportion to the subject. And the larger the light source in proportion to the subject, the softer the light on the subject.

To put it all into simple actionable terms: work with as big of a soft box as you can and get it as close to the subject as you can to create soft transitions of light to shadows.

When I set up a big soft box on a hummingbird perch, the results are going to be different from that of a small frog. For one, the hummingbird is most likely larger than the frog and so the size of that light source will be a little smaller relative to the size of the hummingbird than it would be with the frog. The other difference here is that hummingbirds are constantly flying, moving, bouncing, fighting, etc. For this reason, the flash needs to be positioned further away from a hummingbird perch than from a red-eyed treefrog resting on a vine. Because the light source needs to be further away, considerations must be made because there will be a harsher transition between highlights and shadows.

The first option to solve this problem is simply to use a larger soft box. A larger soft box would compensate for the distance and if you are working from your own backyard studio, setting up a 48-inch soft box is a fantastic idea because the light will be “to-die-for” on the small subject. However, because I must actually lug all this stuff into the remote cloud forests of Panama with me, the smaller 26-inch Rapid Boxes make much more sense. Yes, we are using a modified Land Cruiser with safari racks so I can strap cases of equipment to the roof as we transport gear up the side of a mountain, but with everything else necessary for the workshop, 48-inch soft boxes just aren’t practical (I will ship one down next year ahead of time).

So, option two it is: set up a second flash either twice (or more) the distance of the key light, or at half the power (or less) as the key light, and use it to “fill in” some of those shadows with light.

Honestly, I think this is an imperfect way of handling the situation. One super massive light source close to the subject always looks better and more natural than having to use a fill light. But such is the nature of field photography. We make compromises and work with the limitations of the situation.

Cheers,

Jared