The last hummingbirds of the season

Last week, with the encouragement of Kelly63, I took some shots of the last hummingbird of the season at our feeder (in Mindemoya, Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada). All the others had gone south, but this one kept coming for a few days longer. I hope she got safely south and didn't wait too long. Anyway, these were taken with my Canon A710IS, with exposures between 1/250 and 1/400, mostly using the Macro setting. I will post a few over the next few days. Most are cropped from a larger image.

A big screen is better.

Last month I bought a 15 inch MacBook Pro laptop, which has a pretty nice screen, but not enough screen real-estate for the things I want to do. So on Thursday I got a larger secondary monitor, a 1920 x 1200 px NEC 2690 (25.5 inch diagonal screen).

I've been using my 3001 Scandinavia pictures as a screensaver. The picture changes randomly every 8 seconds or so, and does a "Ken Burns" pan and zoom randomly over the picture.In the past, I've found that this sometimes discovers for me an interesting crop that much improves the picture over the in-camera framing.

What I'm finding is that on this big screen a lot of the pictures that I had dismissed as OK but not very interesting, now have a WOW factor I never expected. Little details stand out (1920 x 1200 px is still a lot less than the 3072 x 2048 provided by the camera). Pictures showing low islands across a blue sea have an impact that they don't on the smaller screen (or on the CRT on my older desktop Mac). It's never as good as being there, but it's a lot closer to being there when the picture is on the big screen. I think the 16:10 aspect ratio might be part of the reason the effect is so much better than on my 1600 x 1200 px CRT.

Anyway, the point of this journal entry is that I would never have believed the size of the screen would make so much difference to the emotional effect of a photograph.

I'm just back from three weeks around latitude 60N in Norway, Sweden, Finland and a day trip into Estonia. I went there with the expectation of encountering rain and sleet going sideways. There was occasional light rain for the first three days, but I was in a meeting, so my wife experienced it on my behalf, wandering about Oslo. That was followed by the longest period of calm, absolutely cloudless weather I can remember experiencing in my 70+ years — a whole week that included two days in Bergen, where it is supposed to rain almost two days in three. After that, we had sunny, warm, shirtsleeve weather apart from one afternoon in Stockholm when clouds moved in and we had a short but heavy shower. Several times I tried for sunset shots, but there were usually not enough clouds!

I took 3001 holiday snaps, and I hope some of them are good enough for DeviantART. I'll post a few over the next few days.

Holiday Snaps

Very few of my pictures taken before joining DA have been taken simply as photographic art. Most of them have been holiday snaps taken as records and reminders. However, since joining DA, and seeing the wonderful pictures taken by so many fine photographers, I begin to see pictures, as pictures, all over the place as I walk around.

Before the days of digital cameras, each shot had to be worth taking. In a month in Greece and Turkey, with a point-and-shoot APS film camera, I took what I thought was an unreasonable number of pictures -- about 360. In a month in New Zealand and Australia, with a point-and-shoot digital camera, I took over 3500, getting a new DVD made every time I filled a 2GB card. When you take several very similar pictures, it's easier to find one that you like to see again. But the best are probably no better than the best taken on film, and perhaps the relative importance of each frame might have made the best of the old ones better than the best of the new.

I shall be in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, for 3 weeks starting next Sunday. Maybe I will get some holiday snaps using the new frame of mind