August 18th, 2015, Hummingbirds

[xoxoxoBruce]

This picture caught my eye, although I had to cut it down because the original is 25" x 8.333".


The photographer said in the Reddit thread...

If anyone is interested in the technical specs, this was shot with a Canon 5D Mk III at 1/4000/sec, f 5.6, using a Canon 100-400 zoom lens. Composited (obviously) in Photoshop, approximately 70 layers, with a final file size of 3600 px x 11,000 px. Also, these are Ruby-throated hummingbirds, mostly females and juveniles, shot in my backyard in New York State.
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I shot at 1/4000 which is pretty fast... 1/8000 was too dark. The ghosting that you might be seeing is the result of shooting in a mirror; you get a reflection from the front of the glass AND the mirrored back of the glass and the result is an overlaid image that look "fractured".

A couple other comments were interesting.

My wife keeps trying to feed them by hand. She stands there patiently for... well, not hours, but a long time. She has succeeded once, which is enough to encourage her to keep going.
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Change the nectar often, be patient, and consider adding a couple feeders so they have options. Sometimes they are finicky about a particular feeder in particular place. Keep at it and give it time, it took a couple years before we had a predictable crop.
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Spending money on commercial hummingbird food is a total waste. They are perfectly happy with table sugar in water. No red color required.
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There's an app called "BirdTunes" that has multiple songs from just about every bird in North America. I take the phone and put it in a small bowl to amplify the sound (this works surprisingly well). You put that phone outside for a few hours set to whatever bird you want to attract and it works better than I ever thought it would. It speeds up the hummingbird attraction to just a few afternoons if there are any around.

You don't need an app, I posted a few days ago about The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library website having the world's largest archive of wildlife sounds and videos.

Happy humming.

[glatt]

That's a visually cool image. I'm not a big fan of composite images. It's cheating to me. But I still like this one.