Humming Bird
by Rick Bures
Title
Humming Bird
Artist
Rick Bures
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
Oregon Hummingbird. In this colorful horizontal composition, a blue and iridescent green hummingbird hovers, feeding, beneath a cluster of pink, trumpet-shaped blossoms. Both the cool colors of the hummingbird and the pinks and purples of the flowers contrast with the greens and yellows of their surroundings. The hummingbird is seen through foliage, and is isolated from its surroundings by a shallow depth of field that throws both the foreground and background well out of focus, with lots of interesting bokeh. The shutter speed was fast enough to freeze the moving body of the bird and reveal a lot of texture an detail in its feathers, but slow enough to allow the wings to blur somewhat, adding a sense of motion in the image. That sense of motion is enhanced a little by the diagonal lines formed by plant stems stretching across opposing corners of the image. Hummingbirds a notable for a variety of reasons. They are the smallest and lightest of the birds, with the smallest of eggs. They collect spider webs to use as nest-building material. With wings beating between 70 and 200 times a second, they can fly backwards, upside-down, and are the only vertebrates capable of sustaining a hover. Tiny animals have very fast heart rates, and hummingbird’s hearts beat over 200 times a minute when at rest, and 6 times that number when in flight. All of that activity demands a high calorie diet of flower nectar, insects, and tree sap from sap wells. Their beaks and long tongues are especially adapted to reaching the nectar in deep flowers, aiding in the pollination of those flowers as they do so. I photographed this wild hummingbird while at the Oregon Zoo, when it came zooming in from a nearby forested area to feed from the flowers in a bed at the zoo. I glanced over, saw it unexpectedly, and quickly raised my camera and depressed the shutter. The camera hunted for focus, locked on, and the shutter tripped three times– and I realized that the camera was attempting an HDR shot, with one frame exposed normally, one 3 stops under for the highlights, and one 3 stops over for the shadows, composited in-camera. I lowered the camera to change the setting, and in that fleeting moment, the little bird was gone, not to return. This image is the result of that quick HDR shot. I went on the website for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, where you can identify various animals, and attempted to identify the species of this hummingbird, with great difficulty, since I never got a really good look at it, and the photo doesn’t show its front side. I originally believed that it was a Rufous Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus), which is the “most common and widespread of Oregon hummingbirds.” The Rufous Hummingbird both migrates through and breeds in forested areas of western Oregon, and is noted for its bold behavior. However, others with more expertise than I have identified it as a female Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna). The Anna’s hummingbird is the largest hummingbird species commonly found in Oregon, and the only one to overwinter in Oregon. It is known for being unusually vocal. See my many other photos of birds and animals.
Uploaded
November 10th, 2017
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