a regular guest

This little guy visits my garden every afternoon just after 4:00 PM.  I have to work fast to capture his (her?) image because he/she doesn't linger.  Occasionally I've seen another hummingbird at the same time.

Busy humans seldom notice how abundant and varied life is on Earth.  There is no place else in our solar system that has the variety of life we have here.  There are some candidates among the moons of Jupiter and Saturn that may have life in giant oceans underneath a thick layer of ice, but what kind of life and how many different forms might there be?  Mars may have once had life and maybe still does in the form of single-celled organisms. But there is no place like Earth, at least not anywhere close.

What would it feel like to see a digital image of a hummingbird buzzing past a flower sent to us from a space probe exploring another world?  I can imagine it would be so overwhelming that we would choke on the lump in our throats; be blinded by the tears in our eyes, and unable to find the words to express the wonder in the image before us.

Monte

hummingbird

In the garden with my camera today.

To get this picture I set my camera (Nikon D5300) on a tripod with a 105 mm macro lens about 20 inches from the feeder.  The exposure settings were 1/3200, f 4.0, iso 400, no flash (it was late afternoon and the sun was shining at an angle on the feeder).  Then I cheated.

I could've waited patiently for the bird to show up, but I wanted to have coffee.  So I attached my gadget for shooting time-lapse photography to the camera and set it to take pictures every 3 seconds.  About 500 pictures later I got this one.

Monte