Janet Brien's photos with the keyword: Juvenile Rufous Hummingbird

1 picture above in a note! :) (To learn why the blue is different in each picture, see the next image!) Every morning I water the tomato plants on our upstairs deck and when I go out there, I also bring Pumpkin in her cage so she can enjoy the sunshine and look at the scenery while she whistles, laughes, and munches on some breakfast. Also, one of her most important jobs is supervising Mom to make sure I do a good job! :) She's a real task master but I don't mind! :D Two days ago I was out there and I saw a moth flutter away from the plant I was watering. I saw it fly again and land below the railing. Taking a closer look, I realized it was a pair of mating Silver-Spotted Skippers! I ran downstairs to get my camera and thankfully they were still there when I returned. When I bent down to begin taking pictures, I heard the twitter of a hummingbird, and the whiz of its wings. Peering up through the tomato plant I was under, I saw a darling hummingbird sitting primly on top of one of the sticks we use to tie up the tomato branches. Turning very slowly, I leaned around the tomato plant and managed to get several dozen pictures!! Unfortunately the sun is behind it, so I had to do a lot of work to correct the exposure, but I think that both of the pictures I chose to process turned out nice enough to share! :) Incidentally, the reason I was able to correct this image so well is because I use the RAW image format when I take pictures. If your camera allows you to use RAW, do yourself the favor of using this format. Each file is much larger than a jpeg because the file stores all of the data of an image, not just a portion. Because of this, the quality of your images will be much better with more colors and details. If you'd like to know more about the benefits of using RAW image format, here's are a couple of links for you! :) Wikipedia: Raw Image Format Digital Photography School: RAW .vs JPEG

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!