This is my contribution to Cee’s Midweek Madness Challenge: Word that contains the letter U prompt.
I decided to go with a natural history theme and had a few ideas for the challenge before thinking of the Ruby-throated Hummingbird.
As this bird doesn’t have a ruby coloured throat it’s a female. Given how smart the birds plumage is I suspect that it’s a juvenile female hatched from an egg earlier in the summer. It was photographed on the South Bruce Peninsula, Ontario in August.
This is my contribution to the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: An Alphabet Challenge – Subjects That Begin with the Letter A prompt.
I enjoy these sort of challenges as it allows me to come up with a theme. Sometimes I take a sideways look at the prompt and head off in a direction that only has a tenuous connection to the challenge.
I had a couple of ideas for the challenge before thinking of abstract images. Possibly because I had photographed a few abstract images of ripples on the local bay this past summer and autumn.
I briefly considered a post exclusively of ripples but decided that would be more appropriate if the prompt was the letter R.
In the end I decided to go with a small selection of photos taken over the past 35 years.
Lichen on a tree trunk with a cheap CCTV lens on the camera.
Foxtail Barley. Detail of the seed heads, it was more about the colour than the plant.
A motion blurred female Ruby-throated Hummingbird.
Ripples on Georgian Bay. Photographed in 1985 and possibly my earliest photo of ripples.
This is my contribution to the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Negative Space prompt.
The prompt started me thinking about some of the photos of plants and flowers I have taken using various fast portrait lenses this summer.
That started me thinking about my use of negative space in some of my bird photography.
My Saturday Bird this week is the Ruby-throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris). The only Hummingbird species that breeds in eastern North America.
This is a male photographed in mid summer. After courtship and mating the male leaves the female to raise the young. Males start heading south as soon as early August.
I selected this photo to show the worn plumage. The bird will moult its plumage when on its wintering grounds. They spend the winter in Central America, Mexico or Florida. Some birds make a 900 mile flight across the Gulf of Mexico.
This is my contribution to the Cosmic Photo Challenge: Our Feathered Friends prompt.
With 30+ years of bird photos I decided to keep it simple and came up with the theme of size divided between North America and Europe.
A young Ruby-throated Hummingbird, one of the smaller birds found in North America.
Two Sandhill Cranes, one of the larger bird species found in North America.
A Eurasian Wren, one of the smaller European bird species.
Portrait of a Grey Heron, one of the larger European bird species.
One thing came to mind as soon as I read the Tuesday Photo Challenge – Yard prompt.
That was spending hours in our yard in 2018 when I was doing a 52 week photo project.
So I thought I would go with a small selection of photos taken in the yard during 2018.
A wet, bedraggled Raccoon that wandered into the yard and started eyeing up the bird feeders one Saturday afternoon.
Raindrops on a Cedar branch on the edge of the yard.
Tree trunks casting long shadows across the snow in the yard.
A Clover flower growing in the grass in the yard. Taken while lying in the grass waiting for the Squirrels and Chipmunks to put in an appearance.
A young Ruby-throated Hummingbird checking out the hummingbird feeder hanging in the yard.
This is a contribution to Jez Braithwaite’s Fan Of… #55 and a ramble about a lens I have been using for 24 years.
I brought the Olympus OM Zuiko 350mm f/2.8 used in 1996 and over the past 24 years it has been used to photograph a wide variety of subjects. The idea for this post came from exchanging comments with Jez after my recent Fan Of… Olympus Cameras post.
Having owned the lens for so long I have thousands of photos taken with it and I was having a very hard time selecting just five or six for this post. So this will be part one of two, this post will cover bird and wildlife images while the second post will cover everything else.
The 350mm lens on my home made ground pod. The ground pod dates back to the early 1990s.
An Osprey with a White Sucker on the Lake Huron shoreline in Southampton, Ontario in 2008.
An American Red Squirrel in dappled sunlight on the South Bruce Peninsula, Ontario in 2018.
American White Pelicans on a channel where a marsh drains into a section of the Last Mountain Lake National Wildlife Area, Saskatchewan in 1999. I was sitting in the water with the lens on a tripod in the water with me.
A Eurasian Wren singing in the spring of 1997 at a reservoir in south Cheshire, England.
A juvenile Ruby-throated Hummingbird in flight on the South Bruce Peninsula, Ontario in 2018.
A Richardson’s Ground Squirrel looking for something to eat having just emerged from hibernation in the spring of 1998. Taken close to the town of Punnichy, Saskatchewan, Canada.
