In the previous issue of the Paws Trails magazine we saw how to set up a high-speed flash system to freeze the movement of birds in flight and capture some special images. This article is a continuation of the previous article and will focus on taking high-speed photographs of bats at night. The equipment needs are essentially the same and many aspects of the set-up are very similar. However, as we are now photographing at night and want the images to appear as nocturnal images we will have the background black with no need for a flash to lighten the background.
I must say bats are truly fascinating animals and while I have spent much of my life studying the behavior of many different animal species the bats are so different from all other animals. For example, I have been working on the beautiful large flying foxes in eastern Australia and these animals will travel thousands of kilometers to visit trees in flower and collect a good nectar feed. Some males are resident at colonies (known as camps) while others are itinerant moving from one location to another. I just marvel at the beauty and strangeness of this very special group of animals. Of course, not all bats feed on nectar, many feed exclusively on insects and some on larger animals like frogs. Here I am talking about the nectar feeding bats, but I will also mention the bats that drink at water ponds and provide an opportunity for you to photograph them in flight.
Photographing Bats at night
The setup for bats is the same as for the hummingbirds, but you only need 2 flashes now because you won’t need an artificial background – bats fly at night so a black background or some real vegetation obviously photographed at night looks good to me. The issue for you as a photographer is that the bats come into the flowers so fast and you can’t see them, so I use an infra-red trigger positioned to point upwards on their flight path as they fly towards the food source. For nectar feeding bats this can be either a real flower in full bloom or a hummingbird nectar feeder and you know roughly where the bats are going to fly so you can set up your trigger to take the photo as the bats are flying. As with the hummingbirds, an appreciation of the biology of the animals helps enormously so the best thing is to get the bats used to the feed source, provide multiple feeders over many days and on the night take down more and more feeders so the bats start to focus on. A small group of 2 or 3 feeders, move one of these above your flower and over half an hour or so take down the extra feeders. In tropical locations you will be astonished at how fast and frequent bats can come into such feeders and you may get photographs as often as every 30 seconds as they fly in, slurp and go around again and again. Many times, I have thought there was something wrong with the triggering device only to find the bats were coming in and hitting the feeder at a rapid rate. Once again, you can manipulate their flight path by placing twigs and branches such that they have to fly down a route where your camera is pre-focused. If the bats are insectivores then you need to find locations where they either swoop down to drink water from a pond or you can photograph them as they leave their roost – once again where the flight path is at the narrowest and if you use sticks and plamps to hold them you can alter their flight route.
There can be issues with the time delay between the infra- red trigger being fired, the flashes going off and your camera taking the photograph. Sometimes the animal can have moved more than 30 cm (a foot) or more before your camera fires and the focus of your camera is way off and you can end up with a photograph of a bat’s bum and not the animal arriving at the flower with it’s tongue extended slurping nectar. To reduce this lag, keep any connecting leads as short as possible and best below 2 meters (6 foot) and trial your system by using a leaf or hand and see where you would expect a bat to be when the trigger fires the flashes, so you get your focus spot on. One method that can help avoid the delay is to leave your camera on Bulb with say an 8 second exposure and with your shutter release set to take continuous photographs. When the bat triggers the flash your camera shutter is already open and you capture the bat nicely exposed and in focus. Make sure there is no ambient light creeping in since you want this to be as dark as possible with a clear view of the bat. The good thing about this technique is that if you have a set up, you can have multiple cameras in and around the setup at the same time and take photographs of the bats from different angles without causing any extra disturbance. One issue with this approach is that, if the bats come faster than every 8 seconds, you will have multiple images which can look good if they don’t overlap although you get a ghosting effect if they overlap and you should reduce your exposure time to 2 or 4 seconds. You must balance the likelihood of a bat arriving with how long your shutter is open and ensure that with the longer exposures your photographs are not subject to ambient light. The other issue is that you can end up with hundreds if not thousands of black photos when the bats aren’t passing through and which you must delete later, so you are better off with a card with lots of storage like a 64 or 128Gb card.
The trigger system I use is the Cognisys sabre infrared trigger (https://www. cognisys-inc.com/products/sabre/sabre. php) which costs about $400 but is really easy to use and waterproof and tough and easy to fit to an articulated arm or tripod. I really like using the Sabre since, once you have a good location and the bats are going well you can relax, have a snooze or grab a drink and enjoy the moon and night sounds while the bats flit in and out knowing every flash should be another image in the camera.
Taking high speed photographs is highly rewarding and you can capture some fabulous photographs which you will enjoy processing later. I took the photographs you see here at the Pond at Elephant Head, Arizona with the resourceful and creative Dano Grayson (danograyson.com) and with Joe McDonald from hoothollow (hoothollow. com) in Ecuador.
