The saga of my backyard hummingbird and me

Here she is – a Ruby-Throated Hummingbird.  Most likely a she, lacking the ruby red throat of the mature male, though it could be a juvenile he, not yet outfitted with the noticeable plumage.

But it has indeed been a bit of a saga to capture her.  Every summer for years the hummingbirds return to my backyard gardens.  Specifically to the Bee Balm (Monarda to some, named for a Spanish botanist in the 1500s) – I’ve seen a few bees buzzing around it, but it’s clearly the favorite of my Hummers.  Wish I knew whether it’s the same family or not; it’s possible given their average lifespan of three to five years.  And there are records of some banded (how do they do that?) species living to 11 years.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to capture these visitors digitally for at least 5 years.  You can understand that because of their beauty and because of their wondrous behavior, hovering, flying backwards, and forwards as fast at 35 mph!  To paraphrase an ad from years ago, "Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Hummingbirds.”  Maybe I should call her Sara Lee?

My first attempts years back resulted in fuzzy renderings, where you couldn’t recognize which of the 300 plus species of this charmer was captured, much less distinguish it from a moth or bumble bee.

But this was the year I resolved to get a crisp close-up, and stop those wings at 80 beats a second.  On day one, I studied her (their?) comings and goings for hours.  Ninety percent of the feedings were at the Bee Balm, hovering next to the petals for a second or two, then zipping to the next, the next and so on.  After about twenty to thirty seconds sipping nectar, they’d zoom to a nearby perch in the hickory or black birch and rest for about four to six minutes.  Then back to the flowers – kind of seemed they didn’t return to the same flower often, but not really sure about that.

Day two. I placed the camera about 15 feet away from the flowers with a 200 mm fast lens on the tripod.  Attached the camera to 75 foot cord with a remote shutter release.  Shutter speed at 1/1000th of a second and aperture at f16 for good depth of field.  My target did eventually visit but was quite wary of the camera.  And had to wait for her to come to the right flower.  Talk about lack of cooperation.

Took about 200 shots and most were complete misses, a few recognizable hummingbird images, but nothing I’d want to share.

Day three was payday!  Waited for feeding time and moved my garden chair (big heavy, carved, teak thing) to within eight feet of the Bee Balm and walked away.  Nobody came, at first – then after an hour or so, she was back.  Next I sat in the chair for another hour and waited.  And she waited.  Could see her flitting around the yard but not approaching me or the flowers.  Whether from hunger, or annoyance, or needing to defend the food supply, I got dive bombed two or three times – she getting within a couple of feet of my head.  What a sound! I heard first hand why they’re hummingbirds, and it’s not because they forgot the words!

So for you techno-geeks, moved the camera’s ISO way up to 6400 (like using a high speed film in the old days) allowing super fast shutter speed and good depth of field (talking having everything within a few inches of the subject in sharp focus with a blurred background).  Hand held now, ditched the tripod.

First couple of shutter clicks scared her away but then it’s like she almost became curious, or perhaps a little teed off.  

For the next couple of hours my backyard Hummer put on quite a show – I think once she felt safe her prima donna personality took over allowing me to capture her antics in many airborne poses. 

These creatures are truly amazing.  Some of the fascinating facts about hummingbirds I discovered while researching ways to capture them in pixels:

• There are well over 300 different species of hummingbirds – the one in my garden being one of the most common in this area, a ruby throated.
• The ability to hover like a helicopter requires incredible energy and these birds have the highest metabolism in the animal world with heartbeats over a thousand beats minute, breathing 250 times in the same period.
• They take in more than their own weight in nectar every day and therefore only a few hours away from starvation.
• Their summer migration from Mexico across the Gulf takes them 500 miles non stop.
• To conserve energy at night they can reduce their metabolism down to 10% of normal in a kind of hibernation, called Torpor.
• The smallest species of hummingbird weighs less than a penny (got to ask who weighs them and how do they do it?)

Ferris Bueller and the Spider Web

If you remember the 1986 movie, Ferris opines: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Now I’m not suggesting you should take a mental health day, play hooky or otherwise temporarily drop out of the rat race.  But I do think it’s easy to miss the fascinating stuff happening all around us all the time.  Stuff like spider webs, like this one:

Anyway years ago I was photographing the ocean along Maine's rocky coast in the early morning fog, from a perfect perch among the scrub pines.  Felt the eerie, shiver-down-your-back feeling when something oh-so-light brushes against your neck.  Rubbed my neck and turned quickly just as the sun burned through the mist and backlighted this spider web.  Click!  Click!  Then the sun disappeared back into the haze pretty much taking the web from sight as well.

And it’s not just the things that escape your view, as Ferris pointed out.  There are often mysteries beneath these visuals as well.  Did you ever wonder why a spider doesn’t get caught in its own sticky web?   Well, apparently over the hundred million years these eight legged air breathing arthropods have been building webs, they’ve developed several kinds of silk: some sticky for catching prey, some not sticky for building and walking on, some specialized for wrapping up dinner.  The silk is stronger than steel, relative to its weight and much more flexible.  I won’t get into the fascinating way these webs are built or how spiders (who don’t see very well) can tell when lunch has arrived.  But you get the point, all this interesting stuff going on around us all the time.

So maybe next Monday you might wake up with some cryptic condition?  Maybe the best cure would be an attentive walk in the woods?  Or in your own backyard?  Or around the block?

Oh, and in case you’re still wondering about the seemingly bogus connection between Ferris Bueller and my web photo, do you remember the friend’s father’s sportscar that he was driving around on his day off?

 It was a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder convertible.

Flowers: Points of View and a little History

I’ve been photographing flowers for many years.  Though not quite as long as they’ve been around, which apparently is more than a 100 million years.  Their arrival on earth and subsequent total domination of the plant world is quite interesting but more about that later.

What struck me as I clicked away, capturing scores of different Irises at the Presby Gardens a couple of weeks ago, was how I became a little desensitized to their beauty, even though there were tremendous variations in shape, size, color, etc.  A kind of habituation to visual splendor.

But then I decided to try a different view, a bee’s perspective if you will, by moving in closer and closer.  The result is shown below, two images of the same flower – one usual, the other zooming in.

Which makes your brain work harder?  There is a physiological (and perhaps psychological) principle behind the question.  Evidently the mind is quite an economical organ – it uses a process to limit energy expenditure. As you are exposed to new and different stimuli, your brain has to first assimilate them, absorb and take them in.  Then it has to accommodate them, fit them in, categorize them and position them within all the billions of other pieces of information in your neurological database.  This all takes a lot of work.  But once all this is done, the next time you see a flower, the mind can take a shortcut, recall the label and say, “oh, this is a flower, neat color, pretty petals, etc. – I don’t really have to look carefully.”

But of course this process, while economical, leads to looking rather than seeing, getting in the way of having a “beginner’s mind.”  Kind of what Picasso meant when he was talking about art, whose purpose he said was, “washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”

Now to some history: you might think flowering plants (called angiosperms) are pretty old, having appeared about 100 million years ago.  But as someone from National Geographic put it, if the world’s history were compressed to one hour, flowers have been around for only the last 90 seconds.  In terms of numbers of species they dwarfed the conifers and ferns (gymnosperms) that came before them by several hundred million years.  What appears to get the paleobotanists’ knickers all in a knot is how quickly flowering plants completely came to dominate the plant world, something like 20 to 1.  This quick succession appears to have really irked Darwin, who referred to it as the “abominable mystery” – a bit of a spanner in the works of his evolutionary theory. His point of view of course required genetic variations making species adept at adapting over long periods of time.

 There continue to be many explanations, one of which is that, conveniently, flowers have male and female parts while pine trees only produce male or female pine cones.  Another is that, unlike trees, which have long lives, flowers live, reproduce and die in shorter lifespans.

Don’t know if the experts will resolve all this soon, but we can all agree that flowering plants, along with their insect partners, have a lot to do with human survival, supplying us with the fruits, nuts, grains and vegetables of our existence.

What makes a fine art photo: creative process, instinct or luck?

There’s an interesting arts venue just off Rt 684 in Croton Falls, NY you might be interested in – the Schoolhouse Theatre (www.schoolhousetheatre.org).  The NY Times calls it “Westchester’s sole claim to consistent, professional theater.”

I mention all this because Schoolhouse also has an art gallery that currently is showing a pretty interesting art exhibit running for a month – paintings, sculpture, mixed media, and photography in partnership with the Katonah Museum Artists Association.

I’m happy to say that one of my photos, Birdhouse, shown below, is included in the juried show.

It was selected by Tom Christopher, who is a well-known contemporary artist with an international following (www.tomchristopher-art.com).  And this is the second time a juror has picked this same photo for exhibition.  Last fall it was chosen by Kenise Barnes, fine art gallery owner (http://www.kbfa.com) for a show at the Gallery in the Park in Pound Ridge Reservation, Cross River, NY.  I’m not mentioning this just to butter my own bread (well, perhaps just a little) but to ask myself a question about what makes a good photo.  Before getting to that, I need to mention a third accolade which came from my good friend, George Arthur, himself a consummate artist, who waxed eloquently about the merits of Birdhouse.  Many of you on this list know George and here is his comment:

"This photo is one of your best. The woven gossamer layers are deep and seem to go on forever. The bird house is the tiny focal point of the composition yet its presence in the photo is instantaneous to the viewer. The colors are all subtle and the darkest part of the picture is the entrance to the bird house. The more you look at this picture the more detail you see. It's cold–it's wintertime, but the picture conveys an unexpected warmth, a sense of nostalgia and innocence. It could be a bird's eye view of the world–almost convincingly explaining why a bird can always find its nest in the labyrinth of tree trunks and branches. I love this photo–it is a masterpiece."

So yes, I really like this photo, but I’m frankly a little surprised by its notable success, in the eyes of some.  Thing is, most of the landscapes I take involve a fairly intense process.  Choosing and working a site, figuring the best vantage point, imagining the best time of day to shoot, the direction and angle of the light, focal length of lens, field composition, etc.  Then taking a good number of shots, changing exposure, depth of field, etc.  But this photo was shot on impulse, one shot, through the open window of my car on the way home – something about the washed out, snow laden limbs of the tree against the background evergreens in subtle contrast.  I didn’t even notice the birdhouse while shooting, at least consciously, and was pleasantly surprised by its centering contribution to the composition when I brought it up on the computer a day later.  Did I see the birdhouse in my mind’s eye on some level and did it ignite the impulse to shoot?  Was the composition instinctive – in post capture process I didn’t have to crop it.  The scene drew my lens like a magnet – you know just like in a seventh grade science class experiment.

Don’t really know the answer to the question raised at the outset.  Interesting to me to ponder but in the end satisfying just to trust in the process, however it happened and wherever it ended.

Seeing things that aren't there

Are you weary of this winter weather? Do we even have a Ghost of a chance of ever seeing Spring?

Speaking of witch :), I captured this snowy apparition in the late afternoon light in one of my favorite parks, Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, NY.

It was a perfect photographic moment: a fresh new luminescent coating covering previous mounds, warm waning light filtering through the woods, backlighting the snow and casting long, sharp shadows.

And a magical transformational moment too, as these shapes took on a new identities, no longer snow piles on a rock wall, but specters draped in flowing sheets,  half hidden faces, wraithlike spindly arms and legs.

The fun of photography, for me, is letting the eyes take over without letting the brain get in the way (by naming familiar things).  Or, more simply put, just seeing things that aren’t there.

Snow Squall (Before and During)

I guess many of us are glad we (talking about those of us in Westchester County, NY and thereabouts) haven’t had a lot of snow so far this winter.  I’ve got mixed feelings on that – don’t care for the shoveling and driving – but miss the photo opportunities that snow presents.  So early last month after a one to two inch coating visited us, I went for a hike in that nearby Adirondack-like property I told you about in a previous blog
 
It was late afternoon, a frigid and blustery day, one that gives real palpable meaning to the phrase bone-chilling cold.  The sky had that bluish grey cast that often portends of snow but the whipping wind occasionally would clear a patch near the west horizon and the sun would break through just for a minute or two, changing the whole personality of the woods to a warmer tone of yellow and gold.  The wind stopped.
 
 That’s when I captured the first image above.  Some call this time of day the Golden Hour, where textures and shadows combine for drama.  When you figure out you are not photographing a subject but light itself.  George Eastman is said to have exhorted photographers to “embrace light.  Admire it.  Love it.  But above all, know light.  That’s when you’ll know the key to photography." 

 
And just as quickly, the light was gone, like someone had pulled down a shade on the woods.  The gunmetal grey sky returned.  I shivered and literally smelled the snow.  A moment later the squall came from out of nowhere and I started clicking away with a slower shutter to capture some movement in the snow.  As the storm lost some of its intensity, not to be outdone meteorologically, the sun made a final appearance, resulting in this capture of fading light in a squall.  And I had just enough time to slip on a softening filter to add a little “romance" to this image below.