Finally! managed to get a few photos of the Sunbirds [this one is a Female. Purple Rumped - Leptocoma zeylonica ] who keep coming back to this shrub to strip off the dry stringy bark for nest-building....
   

  
  TGIF! And so Mannat was straight into the pool this afternoon after school with a rubber ball that she would submerge and then let it «bounce» out of the water. This went on for an hour....and then she spotted a pair of Sunbirds in the shrubs, I got a few frames as they went into the tree and then they shot off as I approached closer....I particularly like the photo of the vertical dive and they took wing.

And a nice sunset... while I was writing this post....so a few quick ones from the window. The color of the light and the buildings made me think of music by Pink Floyd.

2 purple and yellow Sunbirds come to a flowering shrub in the small garden patch which projects out from our apartment into the Mahogany trees outside. They have been busy destroying the shrub by pulling off the outer fibrous bark to take for nest-building.... and I've been trying to shoot photograph them for weeks now. Without any success. The few frames I got, are too dark. So, I setup 2 SB800s suspended them with bungee-cords to the grille above and put a 300mm on the camera inside the room. I wait and I wait and wait and nothing happens! Then, just as I move off for a coffee or a ciggy - I can hear the tweets! By the time I am in position, they are gone.... Anyway, while waiting in vain I've photographed raindrops, flowers from the shrub, and today a dragonfly that spent a while visiting and keeping me company...... but no Sunbirds yet.

The almost-setting sun was behind this flower [can anyone ID it?] and made a kind of 'halo' of the spiky stamens. The background was too bright, I was shooting into the sun light, so if I exposed correctly for the background I lost all detail in the flower. Using a pair of warmed-up [TLA1 gel filters] SB800s off-camera added light into the flower nicely and I was able to darken the distracting background with a fast shutter speed. This image was taken while waiting for the 2 elusive Sunbirds to turn up.... they did but they disappeared as fast as they could when they spotted me looking at them through a big lens.

A sudden rain shower with the sun shining from behind and scattering light through the fat water drops hanging from the railing. I'd shot a dozen frames or so, and had taken the card out to transfer the images to a hard-drive when 2 Sunbirds came to suck up water droplets from the foliage... the spare cards were in a case in the other room and by the time I got the card out of the reader and back into the camera the birds were gone. Anyway, I did get the water diamonds.