Most of my hummingbird photos are taken with a custom Olsen Ultra flash, with 4 flash heads, a canon d60 to 5D mark III, a 100mm canon macro 2.8 EF macro lens, a cardboard background, and a hummingbird feeder just out of sight. There is a point where birds will hover between sips, and that is where I aim and prefocus my camera. However, when I am shooting it bright light (which I can do without ghosts with my powerful flash) my autofocus is fast enough to focus on the bird with the mark III.
This photo is a blue throated hummingbird, shot at Cave Creek Canyon, in the Sunny Flats campground in the Coronado National forest in southeast Arizona. This is probably my best bird photo. I tend to shoot at f16 or f22 for good depth of field on the bird.
I'm well aware that many people would prefer a natural background, but one could be edited in, and my personal preference is to show the bird, the whole bird, and nothing but the bird.
