The Hummingbird Blog

I may have to change the name of my blog from "One Day at a Time" to "The Hummingbird Blog". These little balls of fluff, among the smallest in the class of birds, are so photogenic, I have taken lots of pictures (I am talking hundreds) so I would like to share at least a "few" of those. As long as I can keep the text and images related, I guess I will stick with the them.

One of the things I love about photography - and especially using a telephoto lens to capture images - is that it gives you the ability to see things you would otherwise never have the chance to observe. It lets you get close to animal with your eyes when thry would never allow you to get close with your body. It also permits you to take as much time as you would like examining minute details you might never be able to see from a distance.

Cameras have other useful abilities too, like being able to stop a hummingbird's wing beat, allowing you to see something that would otherwise occur too fast to observe. And, at the other end of time, cameras can also slow something down, creating something you would never see.

I recall one time when my wife played "I'm a camera" hoping to see a hummingbird up close. She stood perfectly still next to one of our hummingbird feeders to see whether one would come in and allow her to examine it. And one did. It flew within inches of her face, hovered there and studied her. The bird was so close, my wife lost her nerve and closed her eyes, fearful it might see the glistening and be tempted to sample her tears.

This one is a little noisy, but I wanted you to 

be able to see the exquisite colors that are there.

Hummingbirds are one of the few birds that will tolerate humans being that close. You couldn't do that with an eagle - unless of course you have a telephoto.

If You Saw It, You Didn't Get It

You cannot film a hummingbird taking off. They do not give

any warning of their intention, but simply take off.

There is probably no better example of this rule (the blog title) than hummingbirds. They can pack a lot of living into a second. To even stop the motion of their wings, for example, I regularly shoot north of 1/4000th of a second. Sometimes, that is not even fast enough. Think about it. A second divided into 4000 parts and one of those is not enough to freeze the motion of their wings!

Every picture you shoot of a hummingbird is, by definition, a chance shot. That is because it is not humanly possible to react fast enough to keep up with them. By the time you press the shutter, they have gotten married and had three children.

Their speed is the main reason for this phenomena but there is another technical excuse. The very instant the camera captures the image, the shutter is closed, meaning you cannot see what you just shot. It is a trait of all single lens reflex cameras. (There are other newer designs such as electronic view finders that try to get around this problem, but those solutions all have their own set of problems.)

This image so reminds me of one of the largest birds of prey I see on

the river rather than one of the smallest birds in the animal kingdom.

You may look at some of these pictures and say, "Wow, you sure are some kind of photographer!" Well, no I'm not. When I pressed the shutter, they were just sitting there! The hummingbirds just do stuff that makes me look like I'm a good photographer.

"...Every claim you stake, I'll be watching you" (by Sting)

While I don't like the yellow jackets hanging out at the water cooler, they continue to come. The only thing I can figure is the hummingbirds are a little sloppy and drip small puddles of sugar water.

I have tried moving the feeder, but that doesn't seem to work. They find it surprisingly fast. It makes me wonder what the world looks like through their eyes. How do they orient to the space they are living in? When I move the feeder across yard (miles in their world), are they finding it by sight or smell or some other sensory apparatus (think gps) we don't even know about?

There has been one undeniable upside to their presence, however. They make the hummingbirds very jumpy which causes them to go through aerial maneuvers not seen under normal circumstances.

I just hope I'm not writing a blog tomorrow called, "To Kill a Hummingbird."

Bouncing Back

I bought a new hummingbird feeder over the weekend (see yesterday's post) and it had an unexpected benefit. The pewter surface where the birds drink out of the "blossoms" reflects light back onto the underside of the hummers beautifully. The old feeder had a copper surface which had lost it's patina. It may have been shiny at one time. It was a gift from a friend more than twenty years ago and I can't remember if it was shiny when it was new.

With the old feeder, I have used white foam core (think heavy-duty poster board) underneath the feeder to try to bounce light up onto the underside of the birds. Working with it was cumbersome, however, and you had to wonder if it bothered the hummingbirds. The new feeder creates wonderful reflected light on the bird's underside which would normally be in shadows.

The bottle isn't cut glass, but the molded glass also does wonderful things with the light. That is especially true when the background is allowed to go dark. It makes all the little contours of the glass stand out.

I'm loving this new feeder! I may have spoken a little too soon about the bees leaving, though.

Let Me Tell You 'Bout the Birds and the Bees

Recall how I said a whole series of problems have to be overcome before you can begin to take good pictures of hummingbirds? Over the weekend, I accidentally added one more when I joggled the feeder a little too much and caused some of the sugar water to leak out around the edge of the feeder. This resulted in yellow jackets finding the feeder, hanging around and inviting other family members to the luau.

How do bees find sugar water? Answers I read on the internet did not convince me that scientists really know. I was fishing on the Chesapeake Bay one time and we were not within sight of land on any side. I popped a soft drink open and within two minutes, there was a yellow jacket claiming it was his. How does that happen over open water and miles from land?

I tried taking the feeder down, rinsing it good and refilling it. They still came. I tried moving the feeder to a different spot. The yellow jackets found it before the hummingbirds did. Once I moved it, you could see them sending out scouts all over the lawn looking for the feeder.

There is nothing meaner than a angry yellow jacket with a short fuse or a disturbed paper wasp. I would look down and discover one flying around me checking me out. Sometimes they were just above the ground around my feet hovering back and forth, trying to zero in on where the feeder went. I was afraid I was going to be stung accidentally.

They were even going after the hummingbirds. And I don't mean a little! They were chasing them all the way across the yard. That'll put you off you feed. And I was afraid it was going to cause the hummers to leave and not come back.

So I made an executive decision to go purchase another feeder at the hardware store. Although it appears to be a similar design, there is a difference which makes it less likely it will overflow or leak and attract more bees. The upside - and I didn't realize when I purchased it - is that the feeder is very photogenic.

The bees had to check this one out too, but once they discovered they couldn't get any sugar water out of it, they left it alone and disappeared. By the end of the day, they were gone. We have had a feeder for years and that was the first time I ever had a problem like that.

That's all I got on the birds and the bees. What? You were expecting something else?...

You Know, it Just Ain't Easy

Hummingbirds can be exasperatingly hard to film. There are so many problems that have to be addressed simply to begin shooting. The best way to handle it is to solve one problem at a time until you have all your ducks in a row, as it were.

We have had two hanging baskets of "Wave" petunias on the porch all summer. They get direct summer sun almost all day long, but they were up to the task. Some of the plants we have chosen in the past haven't been. These, however, have just continued to bloom their little hearts out in, well, wave after wave.

I was all set up to film in one location in the yard and, wouldn't you know it, a female came in and started sampling the petunias. The first image was shot from a little too far away, but I have cropped it closer and it is adequate for display on a computer monitor. (Click on the photo to see a larger version.)

The second image was the hanging plant I found at a local nursery on Friday. It may be the best eight bucks I have spent lately. Especially if I can capture a few more images like this one.

One of the problems that cannot be overcome in filming hummingbirds is if they do not come. With only a short break for lunch, I was out on the front lawn yesterday for six hours waiting to ambush a Ruby-throat. For the life of me, I can't figure why they weren't coming, but their visits were extremely limited over what had been taking place even a day earlier.

At one point, I happened to look almost behind me and there was a hummingbird sampling a geranium.  I somehow knew it's next stop would be the red trumpet flowers of the Mandevilla pictured above. I readied myself for the shot and, sure enough, it flew in, licked this bloom one time and was gone. I had only one second to get the shot. Six hours of sitting - sometimes in the hot sun - and it all came down to one second. Sounds like a football game, doesn't it? If it was a game, it would have been won in overtime.

Beginning Again

After a year off, I have decided to continue posting on my blog. I had gotten burned out, trying to come up with something interesting every day. Perhaps I won't try so hard. I think it will be more intermittent. I don't think I want to try to make it a daily task. I'll just try to take my own advice and take it one day at a time. I had been posting comments on Facebook, which is probably not the proper venue for posting these types of photos and commentary.

It is funny how a record of your photographs - if you take enough of them - can be very much like keeping a diary. Except in my mind, it may be even better when you consider that a picture can be worth a thousand words.

With cellphone pictures being so ubiquitous, I would think more people will begin to realize how true this is.

With that in mind, I offer this tip. I have found that the easiest way to (digitally) organize my photographs is simply by date. I have folders for each year in which are twelve more folders for each month. By entitling them with the year, then the month ("2014-09," for example), the computer will put them in proper chronological order. If you title them the other way around (09-2014) it will not put them in proper order.

To use some other system where you have to re-title each photograph - even in batches - is too cumbersome and time consuming to my way of thinking. I use a program (Adobe Lightroom) which can add keywords to the original picture file in the exif data, so it is relatively fast to find a particular photo by searching for a word. I currently have sixty-eight thousand photos, so looking for a specific photograph and searching "by hand" could be a BIG time waster.

If you are taking photographs on a daily basis - even if you don't consider yourself a "photographer," I would suggest you purchase Lightroom. It is a database program. It does not store your photographs; it stores information about your photographs and where to locate them. Having used it since it's introduction, I can recommend it without hesitation. I don't know what I would do if I didn't 

have this program to organize photographs. It would simply be unmanageable.