Photographing Hummingbirds With the Sony A7IV

Madness! Step into a rainforest garden in Panama and you're instantly surrounded by a blur of buzzing wings and flashes of colour - a dozen hummingbirds, each barely bigger than a butterfly, whizzing around like flying gemstones. Mesmerising to watch, near impossible to follow. 

On the recent Rainforest Animals of Panama tour, we recorded 240+ bird species (including 15 types of 'hummers') and 18 mammals. A highlight was our stay in a rainforest tower - 300 feet up, we were eye-to-eye with toucans, tamarin monkeys, and sloths, with sweeping views in every direction. It’s an unforgettable perch for creative photography. 

Far more relaxing than trying to photograph the tiniest, fastest bird in the gloom of the rainforest. But I fancied a challenge. So that’s what I did.

I love photographing hummingbirds as they pass through pockets of light, shimmering like sequins. But keeping a bird smaller than a butterfly in focus, mid-air, in low light, is a game of luck and frustration.

For this trip, I was collaborating with Sony again, creating video content and field-testing the A7 IV with the 200–600mm lens. Even as these tiny marvels zipped in and out of shadow, I was genuinely amazed by how confidently the A7's autofocus tracked the bird’s eye. That reliability, and the brief image playback in the viewfinder, gave me freedom to take more intuitive images - to respond to the moment, to shape the pockets of available light, and to lean into creative risk. 

In fast situations where luck usually wins, this was a revelation. Frustration evaporated and was replaced with enjoyment playing with different shutter speeds, backgrounds and magnifications. My early shots were the typical photographer's approach - shoot fast at 1/5000 sec and high ISO to freeze motion. 

But even at 600mm, I shot into the forest gloom, bringing my shutter down to 1/200 to capture wing blur and a more honest sense of the bird’s frantic energy. I like to pre-visualise shots, but not today. There is a lot of freedom in trusting the camera to do what it does brilliantly, and simply responding to the dazzling madness.

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