An excellent resource, as was the site that tman linked to above.

I see now that I made the common mistake to hummingbird photography that most people make at first. As you point out, you can't do it with shutter speed, you need fast (1/20,000 sec. or better) flash. So, I am indeed limited by my equipment, but the camera itself is not the weak link. It has TTL flash control through the hotshoe (Panasonic does not publish the maximum flash/shutter sync speed, but in this instance it isn't relevant) but I don't own the requisite flash units. I'm not willing to shell out $500+ for a bunch of strobes and remote triggers just to satisfy my ego and be able to say I got some great hummingbird pictures. There are plenty of photos out there that are far better than anything I'm ever likely to come up with.

I'm not sure that in my shooting environment that the strobes would do the job. My hummingbirds only seem to visit during daylight hours, and where I am daylight means very bright sunlight. With an ISO setting of 100 (the lowest I have) and a shutter speed of 1/200 (my best guess at my maximum flash/shutter sync speed) my nominally correct exposure is f8. Even if I stop down to f11 and use flash, all the background and the birds themselves are lit up with enough ambient light (only one stop underexposed) to pretty much negate the results of the flash. I guess a four f-stop neutral density filter and some really powerful flash units would do the trick, but I'm just not going to go that far to get a couple of bird pictures.

However, as a result of this thread and the links in it, I now [theoretically] know how to take hummingbird pictures, even if I don't have the equipment to do so.

tanstaafl.