I had my normal breakfast and watched some hummingbirds at our feeder. We were surprised to see them so early because it was only about 39°F (4°C) outside.

I went outside around 8:40 to set up our strobist flash system, and I changed the setup from yesterday. Today, I hung our homemade light stand carrier as a backdrop and supported it by a broom handle between a tree trunk and the light stand for the rim light. I used J's Canon Speedlite 420EX, attached to one of the PT-04TM wireless flash trigger receivers, to illuminate the background, and set up my Canon Speedlite 550EX to be a slave to my Canon Speedlite 580EX II. I liked the results with an illuminated background much better than the "black hole" we were getting yesterday. Not as many hummingbirds came by as I was shooting, but I got a decent shot of a magnificent hummingbird (below left) and a really nice image of a broad-billed hummingbird (below right). A rufous hummingbird made one pass at our feeder, but didn't pose well before moving on.


I went inside the RV around 11:45 to have lunch, and J used the flash setup by herself for a while. I worked up a blog entry, then went outside around 1:15 to take down our strobist system. We prepped the RV to move and I stowed the solar-electric panels. We left the campsite at 2:04, almost in time for the 2:00 checkout time. :) We hooked up the Jeep to tow, then left the campground at 2:12.

We went to the WalMart in Green Valley around 3:10 after we took a tour of a residential neighborhood trying to get there because our GPS was thoroughly confused about where the WalMart was located. Among other things, we picked up some materials to make a better background for hummingbird setups. We left at 3:53.

We went to The Pond — Bill Forbes' excellent photographic site on his ranch in Amado around 4:30. Bill is the inventor and producer of the Phototrap camera and flash trigger systems. We had a reservation to photograph bats at The Pond tonight and then birds all day tomorrow. We got the RV situated in his lot, then I made dinner.

We had dinner at 5:15 of Bertolli Italian Sausage & Rigatoni and a simple salad.

Bats at The Pond

We headed out to The Pond around around 6:00 to set up to photograph the bats. J used her Canon 5D Mk II and 70-200 f2.8 and I used my Canon 1Ds Mk III and 100-400. The cameras were set low to the ground at one end of The Pond and focussed on an area that was crossed by four infrared (IR) beams. When a bat flew through the beams, a Phototrap system would fire three flashes to illuminate the bat and make the exposure. Bill had some IR illuminators to light the approach area and a video camera attached to a small TV inside one blind, and J and I sat in another blind with extra long cable releases running out to our cameras. When Bill would see a bat approaching, he'd call out "Bulb" and we'd hit our cable releases to open up our shutters (set to a bulb exposure) until either the flashes fired or a few seconds passed if the flashes didn't fire. Well, that's how it was supposed to work. In practice, either his new video camera, that he was just trying tonight for the first time, or his older small TV went on the fritz, so after about half an hour of very little bat activity, we were flying blind. Bill got us a standalone camcorder and we looked for bats on the tiny flip-out screen on our own while Bill worked on his video system.

Meanwhile, Bill's friend Tom came by, and we chatted while watching for bats. I had met Bill and Tom on a bat photography workshop in 2007. Photographing the captive bats on that shoot was much, much more productive! Up until Tom came tonight, we had only captured one marginal image of a bat, but it was a totally free bat. On the workshop, we easily captured a dozen good images of several species per night. Bill and Tom will be supplying their captive bat photography setup for my bat photo tour this August, and I can't wait to be able to get some more great bat images like the one to the left.

Before Bill got his video system working again, the battery for the small camcorder we were using died, so we were flying blind again and missed the opportunity to capture whatever triggered the flashes three times. :( Around 9:10, after getting just that one one marginal shot of a bat, we switched from manual mode to a fully automatic setup with a second array of IR triggers that would trip our shutters for a 3 second exposure, and then the first array of IR triggers would fire the flash to make the exposure. There was some difficulty with that setup initially, but Bill got it working before we left to let the phototrap system work all night.

We returned to the RV around 9:30 and we each took a body shower (didn't wash our hair). I selected and processed two hummingbird images for the blog before going to bed.