Meal worms feed hungry baby birds. That’s got to be why they’re called meal worms! This Black-capped Chickadee waits outside its nearby nest box with a meal worm in its beak. Shot in the Eastern Sierra about a year ago with a Nikon D5 and a Nikkor 180-400mm lens.
The Frick Collection is an art museum in New York City, housing the art collection of industrialist Henry Clay Frick. I visited this fascinating place a few years ago when I was in NYC. Now, with the pandemic interrupting every aspect of our lives, the Frick, like other museums and places where people gather, is closed to the public but their presence on social media allows us to enjoy gorgeous pieces of art from our homes. In a May post on Instagram, the Frick talked about how still life painting invites us to “take a closer look at the things we encounter on a daily basis.” The post featured a 1730 oil painting by French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin called “Still Life with Plums. The Frick challenged viewers to create their own still life by creating their own arrangement of common household items.
I was captivated by the still life and over the past few weeks I kept thinking that I would try recreate it myself. Yesterday, I saw white nectarines at the grocery store and knew they would have to substitute for the plums with a few mandarins thrown in. I should have read the description of the painting a little more carefully because what I thought were odd shaped baguettes were really squash. But the Dutch crunch tolls I used look similar. The wooden bowl is contemporary to Chardin, from my Grandmother’s family in Sweden from the early 1700’s and the table is an old growth redwood board circa 1880 salvaged from Sunset Line & Twine Co. in Petaluma, CA. The bottle is an unknown vintage of Tia Maria Liqueur that has probably been in my cupboard for more than 40 years. Getting the lighting right was a challenge and I never could get a shadow from the glass like in the painting. I added a little oil paint effect in Photoshop. You can view Chardin’s Still Life with Plums here. This is my take on the painting.
Despite the four feeders hanging in the garden, the Anna’s Hummingbirds always check out the flowers and the Black and Bloom Salvia is one of their favorites, especially since the Pineapple Sage is currently flowerless.
There were two Anna’s Hummingbirds in the yard, one chasing, one being chased. This Anna’s is the one doing the chasing now perched, resting, and overseeing his domain. I used the Nikon D6 and Nikkor 500mm PF. It’s nice to have the 500mm PF lens back in my hands. I am renting this one for an upcoming trip because my own 500MM PF is at the Nikon Service Center in Los Angeles for routine maintenance. I’ve been without it for two and a half months and have been using the 300mm PF with the 1.4X teleconverter in its place to photograph hummingbirds. When I first attached the 500mm PF to my new Nikon D6 I thought something was wrong. I soon realized I was getting too close to the subject. The 300mm PF allows me to within 4 1/2 feet of the subject and with that lens, I am able to approach the hummers that closely. The minimum focusing distance of the 500mm PF is twice that so I have to remember to step back a bit to achieve focus.
