Story of the Image
The Long Tailed Sylph , along with its close cousin the Violet Tailed Sylph , form the family of sylphs in Ecuador. It is in that country where I photographed this particular bird.
In Ecuador, the cloud forests of Mindo are considered to be one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. Flora and fauna species change within a few miles of traveling within it. As you can imagine, this biodiversity is not restricted to birds, but also trees and plans.
Gear/Preparing the Scene
Here’s a useful tip, in my opinion—as a full time nature photographer, I always carry two to three camera bodies with me. This is so that, in case one fails, I always have a backup. This image was one of the many instances where my primary camera body stopped working due the high humidity. I switched to my Canon 5d Mark IV and fired away. In terms of speed, the 1dx drives a much faster speed when it comes to frames per second, but the 5d <ark IV packs more pixels ensuring a larger overall image size giving me more cropping power
To get the image, I setup a hummingbird feeder close to this plant and waited for the birds to arrive. Once we had a lot of birds around, I replaced the feeder with this plant and flower. I then sprayed some sugar water to attract the hummingbird. Once it appeared, I kept shooting until I got the entire bird in one frame with its tail perfectly displayed.
Composing the Shot
This was the least complicated part of the process as I already had the frame pre-planned in my mind. Due to the shape of the bird, I chose to shoot vertical to get the entire tail in the frame. Luckily the bird complied!
Perfecting in Post Processing
As always, the first step is to fix the White Balance. In this image, Auto White Balance was the way to go.
I then increased the overall Exposure and Shadows on the so that all the details were visible.
The image was now ready to be edited.
I selected to crop it in a 4:5 aspect ratio to get the entire bird ihnt eframne, but also leavelittle mnegative space. This lack of additional space allows viewers to focus on the tail.
Once cropped, I started working on the adjustment layers. I added a layer of Brightness and Contrast and increased both to my desired numbers
I then bumped up the overall Vibrance to enhance the blues and violets on the tail.
My image is now ready to be resized.
Next step was to increase the overall sharpness of the image using the image sharpening tool.
Now it’s time to save it in the right profile.
For web prints, I use sRGB, For physical prints, I use Adobe RGB
The final step is to save it as a JPEG at the highest resolution as shown below:
Final image:
About the Bird
This is the only Hummingbird species that is found on the eastern slopes of the Andes and its long and striking tail gives its name. The females choose the males based on their dazzling blue and green tail feathers, as that indicates their good health. They have short beaks with which they pierce flowers to sip nectar.
