Birds: Hummingbirds

This gorgeous little beauty was photographed on my property in Southern Oregon in July 2011

We have a hummingbird feeder hanging off our back deck, and this year we've gotten a lot of visitors coming by for drinks. After we found out the nectar is just sugar and water, we decided to make ourselves and the birds seem to love it much more than the powdered mix we used to give them! Unlike other years, there are little darlings coming by all day long! This evening I saw 4 of them sitting and drinking at the feeder with one on a perch nearby waiting for a turn for a tasty beverage! (There are actually six seats, but these feisty birds don't often want to be so crowded!)

2 more pictures in notes above and a silly text note too! :) This quote really fits because today I'm stretching out of my comfort zone: I made a post on Flickr to say that I will no longer be uploading pictures and will be deleting all but my last two pictures in a few days. Ouch...not an easy thing to do!!! Leslie C. "Les" Brown (born February 17, 1945) is a motivational speaker, former Ohio politician, popular author, radio DJ, and former host of The Les Brown Show. As a politician, he is a former member of the Ohio House of Representatives.[1] As a motivational speaker, he uses the catch phrase, "It's possible," and teaches people to follow their dreams as he learned to do. Wikipedia: Leslie C. "Les" Brown Explored on July 31, 2013. Highest placement: page 2 (#38).

1 picture above in a note! :) Here's another darling image of this adorable youngster. There are at least 6-10 who visit us all day long. Probably parents and two clutches of babies. They are really fun to watch as they argue about who gets to be at the hummingbird feeder...even though there are six "seats", they don't want to share! :D By the way, if you compare these two hummingbird images, you'll notice a difference in the coloring. The reason why is that on this picture, I specifically metered the exposure so that it correctly exposed the hummingbird. However, that caused the sky to totally blow out to white. Once I got my picture into photoshop, I selected the hummingbird, placed it and the post on another layer, and properly exposed the sky...presto, it turned a pretty blue again. I also worked on correcting the exposure on the bird and added a bit of saturation, since it has the sun behind it. In the first picture (see the inset note), I focused on the bird but didn't do anything to meter the image. The result was a very dark bird with the sky as you see it. This is a good example of what you can expect if you use exposure metering on a specific spot in your picture!