I don’t know if this is a climate change thing or just an anomaly but all my azaleas have blossoms on them right now. It’s not the glorious spring bloom when the color of the flowers completely obliterates the green leaves but there are quite a few blooms on all of my azaleas. One of the white azaleas in my back yard beckoned to be photographed. Then, when I looked at the images, it looked so ordinary that I had to add some enhancements, grunging it up a little.
Finding myself at loose ends on Thursday, the respite between storms gave me a brief window so I ventured out. I found this red shouldered hawk perched on a wire near Sheridan intently gazing for prey. Although this photograph is only a shot of a perching bird, I was happy to see it healthy and free. The last time I knowingly encountered a red shouldered hawk was a couple of years ago when I was still doing hawk rescues. That red shouldered hawk was severely injured with a bleeding and broken wing. Sadly, that bird had to be euthanized.
This female Anna’s hummingbird had to fly to the less popular blue fountain in my yard to bathe when Homer, in the second photograph, decided to keep the main fountain to himself. I love the giant drop on Homer’s beak. I’m thinking that I’m going to have to name the female since Homer now has a name, although I now know that there are two male Anna’s hummers living in the yard. I’ll have no way to telling which is which so I’ll call them both Homer. I think I’ll call the female Helen which sort of works with Homer I think.
My fountain continues to attract all kinds of birds. I haven’t seen a Ruby-crowned Kinglet here in years so I was glad to see him while I was waiting for the hummers to go to the feeders. These birds are as small as the Anna’s hummingbird. While I watched him preening in the shrubs after his bath, I could have easily mistaken him for a hummer. He was wary of me, seated so close and each time I triggered the shutter release he would jump to the shrubs. And, no, I didn’t lift my finger off the trigger startling him. It was the flash that made him jump. 😊 I’d trigger the shutter twice and the first shot had a bird and the second shot did not have a bird. But, each time he would immediately return to the fountain so we did it all again.
After posting the gull photograph yesterday that was a rather loose interpretation of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, I got to wondering about more gull photographs I may have taken so I reviewed my beach panning photos from North Padre Island in Texas. I had completely overlooked a group of gull shots I took in the first minutes of my first attempt at beach panning.
One of the beauties of this technique is that the photographer is so close to the ground he creates a unique point of view that causes the viewer to wonder “how did he do that?” Well, I have to say, I’m wondering about this shot myself and I took the photograph! I know I was laying on the beach and my camera was resting on its Frisbee with the lens focused on the gull walking into the surf. But now that I look at the photograph, I see only water at the bottom of the frame and no sand between me and the bird. In order to figure out what was going on in this photograph, I reviewed the shots leading up to this one. For about 30 seconds, I tracked and photographed this gull as it approached me on the beach. In the first several shots, the sand is clearly visible. Then the surf splashed in and surrounded the gull who continued to walk through the water. The water rolled up the beach toward me. After looking at these photos, I remembered that almost immediately after I started my first attempt at beach panning, I was forced to stop and pick up my camera rig to save it from being inundated by the surf. That is why there is no sand showing. There was no sand to show. The mistiness at the bottom is the out of focus foam of the wave.
Turner Classic Movies featured an Alfred Hitchcock marathon on New Year’s Day. Among the several I watched was, of course, The Birds, a movie that I have always loved for many reasons, among them was that it was filmed in Bodega Bay, an area near where I grew up in Santa Rosa and with which I am familiar. After watching the film I realized I had to feature a photograph on my blog that somehow depicted The Birds. Of course, I can identify with the bloody results of a bird beak attack, having suffered many such excruciatingly painful injuries over the years inflicted by Bobo. But, I wanted to feature some of the thugs depicted in The Birds.
I photographed these Laughing Gulls from the ferry on the way to the Bolivar Peninsula from Galveston, Texas last April. Since the gulls and the crows wreaked the most havoc in the film and since I have no photographs of crows, I thought gulls would be appropriate. Looks like this pair is headed in for the kill!
It wouldn’t be a New Year’s Day post on this blog without a photograph of a hummingbird. I took this shot late morning on New Year’s Eve. This may or may not be Homer. What I discovered on New Year’s Eve is that there are three hummingbirds in my backyard and two are males. There was a bit of a dispute over use of the fountain but all three birds seemed united to get me out of the yard. While I stood in the middle of the patio with my camera aimed at the hummer over the top of a rose tree, I didn’t notice that leaves from said rose tree encroached on the bottom of the shots while I focused on his head. My failure to notice the interference resulted in a green fuzziness at the bottom of the hummer’s body. Although I tried, I couldn’t get a similar photograph but since the bird’s posture in this shot is one I continually seek, I decided to use it. On the bright side, it was another gray, gloomy day so my blue Weber barbecue added a cheerful blue to the background.
