Next to Laguna del Lagarto Lodge, Adolfo and his assistant Emilio run a specialist photography area on a covered deck adjacent to the forest. They have designed a sophisticated multi-flash setup in conjunction with expert bird photographers, enabling stunning photographs to be taken in almost perfect conditions.

By day, hummingbirds come from the forest to feed on flowering plants lit by the multi-flash setup. After dark, nectar-feeding bats visit another arrangement of flowers and flashes. I photographed both sessions on my own rather than in a group (which is the normal setup). Having the entire place to myself was terrific and gave me the flexibility and time to get some of the best hummingbird shots of the trip, as well as some remarkable shots of bats, which I had never achieved before.

The huge advantage of this setup is being able to shoot at base ISO for maximum image quality while simultaneously freezing the wing motion in a way that even 1/4,000 s cannot achieve. These were the only shots on the entire trip where the wing detail was fully captured without the slightest blur. It's clearly not a wholly natural environment, but the birds are used to the flash and seemed completely untroubled by it. It is an entirely different situation from suddenly exposing a frog to a blinding flash at night.

The covered deck is not lit except when the flashes fire, so the scene is actually pretty dim. Following the birds through the viewfinder in this light is a real challenge for any photographer. However, the OM-1 Night View display, which amplifies the viewfinder brightness in dim conditions, transformed the situation, and I completely recommend it in multi-flash setups like this. Night View plus Pro Capture enabled me to take thousands of perfectly sharp frames, from which I have selected ten with different species, flowers, angles and wing positions.

The bat session was much harder. It took place at night, and the space was completely dark apart from a dim modelling light. The technique that worked in the earlier hummingbird session did not work here at all. The bats appeared briefly and flew too fast for me to use pre-capture. In addition, I found after a frustrating 20 minutes that Night View caused a small but crucial delay between pressing the shutter and the flash firing. This was not an issue with the relatively slow-moving hummingbirds, but resulted in a lot of missed photographs for the lightning-fast bats. Once I turned Night View off, the flash responded immediately, and my hit rate improved.

It was still very difficult photography because without Night View, all I could do was roughly point the camera at the flower and fire as soon as I sensed the tiny movement of a black bat in the night. A group session preceded mine, and a very disconsolate French photographer told me he'd managed to get only one shot and wasn't even sure about that. I was therefore absolutely delighted to get these final eight photographs, which follow the Pallas's Long-tongued Bats as they approach the flowers, feed and fly away.

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