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Picture-A-Week 2017 - Week 42


pierces
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Yesterday was an amazing day for hummingbirds for me. I'll point out that I don't get to shoot hummingbirds at a feeder, they're not around my house, I don't have a spot where they nest...the only way for me to see and photograph a hummingbird is purely in the wild - a chance encounter and sighting. So I rarely get to photograph one up close, I don't have a controlled place to sit and shoot from, I don't use artificial lighting - and they're so tiny, they're hard to notice when you're just walking through a forest. I did happen to notice one yesterday - sitting at the end of a branch on a dying tree in a cypress tree stand at my local wetlands...then noticed another sitting nearby. Then a third buzzing past them. And a fourth and fifth flying in and out. They occasionally called out or chattered at each other, occasionally seemed to be chasing off each other, and some seemed to be pairing off with each other. I had my 100-400mm lens with me, and also put on the 1.4x teleconverter for a few, to get even closer at 560mm. They were ruby-throated hummingbirds, and also for the first time I was able to get the male's reflective red feathers under the neck, that gives them the name. Here are a few shots of them:

 

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Here's the male, showing his 'rubies':

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Some of the other wetlands life yesterday included this impossibly small baby turtle. The leaves you see him sitting on are about the circumference of a quarter:

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And a Florida brown water snake, all curled up around some reeds to stay out of the water and dry off:

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While going through photos from a weekend family birthday party with a farm theme, I came across this porcine portrait. The first thing that popped into my head was the truism, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig”. I’ve heard that phrase many times in my life and I always understood the underlying meaning that superficial cosmetic changes don’t change the basic foundation of an object or process. I have heard it used for everything from a paint job on a sub-par custom car to a pretty interface on a basically flawed warehouse management system but the mental image of lipstick decorating this hairy porker really brought the meaning home.

 

Lipstick Wouldn't Help

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Dave

Edited by pierces
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