Rubies and Emeralds

If you catch a hummingbird while it is blinking, it can appear as though they have a superiority complex. This is one fat little bird!

The quality of the light certainly changes throughout the day. Here it had a golden early morning quality about it.

While I was waiting for hummingbirds, this scruffy-looking Carolina Wren flew in. I believe it may be an adolescent. Wrens are almost always very chatty and friendly.

One of my favorites from the day. It isn't always necessary to set the shutter speed high to stop wing motion, and setting it high doesn't always insure you will stop wing motion without blurring. I noticed a frame today where despite being set at 1/2000 second, the wings were still blurred. On the other hand, this was shot at 1/1250 second and because it caught the wings at the apex of movement where there is a brief pause to turn back in the other direction, the wings are fairly sharp. You can't time this, but it is not too difficult to achieve.

So many beautiful colors — the emerald greens of the bird, the ruby red "blossoms," and the blue reflections in the glass. The darker the background, the better it seems the glass bottle appears. The section that bulges just above the reservoir acts as a lens inverting and reflecting the scene from  what is behind the camera.