New Yorker Sets up Angled Mirror Underneath the Feeder — and Records Hummingbird Activity for Hours

Brian Maffitt (u/bmaffitt), a photographer and serial entrepreneur, was fascinated by the unique engineering of hummingbirds displayed as they fluttered their hover wings back and forth, carving 8 in the sky. While living in his house in Chestnut Ridge, New York, he noticed that these birds visited in bulk in his backyard to feed on nectar before migrating to the South in mid-September. In the fall of 2015, he came upon an unusual idea to record these bird guests while they swarmed his backyard to load up their calories before flying away.

He set up an angled mirror underneath his hummingbird feeder, recorded their activity for several hours, and combined all the shots to create a composite photo he shared on Reddit. Within just a few hours of his post, more than 500 people changed their Facebook covers to Maffitt’s dreamy photograph. The picture Maffitt shared displays the red bottom of the hummingbird feeder with hints of yellow flower-shaped feeding ports spilling onto the camera from its border. Hovering above the feeder is a handsome bouquet of ruby-throated hummingbirds, mostly females and juveniles, whose metallic green silhouettes appear in a striking contrast against the powder blue sky.

Maffitt shared that the breathtaking vista is a composite photo shot with “Canon 5D Mk III at 1/4000/sec, f 5.6, using a Canon 100-400 zoom lens.” The image was composited in Photoshop, approximately 70 layers, with a final file size of 3600 by 11,000 pixels. From the original collection of 70 clean shots, he used about 60 to compose the final image.

He also shared a photograph of the entire setup with PetaPixel, according to which, the mirror was angled and rigged on a Manfrotto tripod with a DigiPlate laptop mount. It was angled in such a way that it aptly collected the reflection of the red base of the feeder dangling above it on a hook attached to a tree. The feeder seemed to be half-filled with nectar. On one side was a cluster of trumpet-shaped red bee balm flowers.

While he took the shots, sitting on his patio, the camera was locked to the “manual time lapse” mode. He used a cable release to shoot in bursts whenever a hummingbird visited the feeder.  “Assembly of the final image took me about 8 hours of steady editing, as each bird had to be carefully masked and positioned,” Maffitt told PetaPixel.

“This guy's an innovator,” Reddit user u/deegee22 commented on Maffitt after seeing the dramatic photo. The lush flock of hummingbirds in the picture prompted Reddit users to concoct comical perspectives and visuals. For example, u/AusCan531 wrote, “That's enough to make an Air Traffic Controller twitch!” In a reply, Reddit user u/doubleUsee pronounced a fictional order, “FEDR Control, This is HUM269 requesting landing at runway 26 Left.”

Other viewers likened the photo to a surreal desktop background, an album cover, a “Muse Absolution cover,” vector field, and whatnot. One said it would make an amazing canvas print. u/teamluc added, “Now girls have a few more silhouettes to choose their new tattoo from.” u/wolfeh56 remarked, “Before reading that title, I thought the thumbnail was a time lapse of planes in the sky.” For u/MisterRegio, the photo resembled the poster for a “cuter version of Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds.’”

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