Month: August 2023

Sadie the Golden Retriever came to visit this weekend. She’s 9 months old, full of energy, and single-minded. Retrieving the ball was her primary interest (after harassing Bobo the parrot who stood her ground). With the patio door ajar and my brother, sister-in-law and me sitting around the table catching up, Sadie would drop the ball at the foot of whomever had last tossed it, then she would immediately take up her position on the other side of the pot of California Fuchsia, waiting expectantly for the ball to appear in the air above her. Sometimes she had an extended wait as we had lots of catching up to do. I was impressed with her patience, though. Sometimes instead of peering over the California Fuchsia, as in this shot, she laid down next to the pot staring intently at us through the open patio door.

I loved the posture in each of three consecutive images of a Broad-billed Hummingbird I took at Madera Canyon in July so I merged them into a single image.

The little male Black-chinned Hummingbird visited the feeders at Madera Canyon often but the feeders were usually dominated by the jewel-like Broad-billed Hummingbirds. Because we already had so many shots (but there’s always room for one more, right?!) of the Broad-bills, we were always on the lookout for the hummer species that came one at a time, not in a swarm like the Broad-bills. The first person to spot one of the more elusive hummers called out the species to alert everyone. When the Black-chinned arrived, it always seemed as if from my perspective, the little hummer was behind a feeder or too far away. One day he arrived and I had a clear view but he was a bit too far away so I switched on DX crop so he would be a bit larger in the frame. Suddenly he flew directly in front of me so he filled the frame and seemed almost too close. He didn’t turn enough to light up his purple gorget but there is a little touch of purple. This is my favorite Black-chinned Hummingbird shot from Madera Canyon this year.

This immature Rufous Hummingbird is working hard but doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. This is a GIF created from four consecutive images taken at 20 frames per second and slowed to .2 of a second. I had never created a GIF and now that I discovered it is so easy to do in Photoshop, you’ll probably be seeing more GIFs from me, especially because using the Nikon Z9, I can easily take lots of consecutive images in a fraction of a second. I was especially pleased with this series because the edge of the feeder was not a part of any of the images so what you see is what I took at Madera Canyon a few weeks ago.

A male Rufous Hummingbird waits his turn before flying up to the feeders. The backgrounds were constantly changing as the sun moved and clouds filled the sky. We also rotated our shooting positions twice a day so the backgrounds were different at each position. This year at Madera Canyon, the rains have eased the drought just a bit and the trees were much greener than during our last visit there a couple of years ago. But all was not green. There were large oak trees and their brown bark sometimes created dark backgrounds as seen on the right of this image. Where a huge branch had broken away from a tree, a large light patch reflected light and sometimes created distractions. I was lucky in this shot because the sun was behind a cloud so the reflection behind the hummer was not distractingly bright. There were times that I didn’t shoot in a particular direction because of the distracting highlights in the background.