I learned something new yesterday.
It was a quiet morning on Hackberry Farm. Overnight, a cool front blew through, and the morning temperature felt a tad “crisp” compared to what the weather had been. Overnight, the temperatures dropped into the 50’s outside, and the air felt good. I am an early riser, so I went for my daily walk in the dark down the gravel road where I live.
When I got back home, the sky was just starting to lighten. Not wanting to waste the beautiful weather by being inside, I took care of a few chores outside: I heard the automatic chicken door open and let our hens loose from their coop; I talked to the hens for just a minute, and then I went and sat on the front porch of the barn and watched the hummingbirds congregate around their feeder.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been taking steps to increase our hummingbird numbers here, and now it looks like we’ve reached a critical mass. As the eastern sky turns orange, the hummingbirds converge on the feeders and jockey earnestly for a sip of sugar water we provide.
I’m not one to sit idly by while a photographic opportunity presents itself, so I get my camera. As the hummingbirds feed around the feeder, they jockey and hover against the eastern sky, making beautiful silhouettes. So I shoot picture after picture of them against a sky that starts off a deep blue and slowly transitions to orange.
According to an app on my phone, the sun rises at 7:02 a.m., but I can only see it once it rises high enough to breach the treeline that vaults along the creek that runs through the farm. When I can finally see the sun, I decide to try to get hummingbird silhouettes with the sun in the background.
One of the things that I teach people is that if you want the sun to look a natural size in your images, shoot it at 200mm. I’ve got a 70-200mm zoom on my camera, so my setup is perfect. The bright sky ensures that I can accomplish a high shutter speed to freeze the wings and, all the while, shoot at a low ISO for maximum out-of-the-camera image quality.
I got in position and shot the first couple of shots. The composition looks good, and the exposure is spot on, but wait…. What’s that?
I shoot more images, and I see it again…
When backlit, the iridescence of hummingbird wings takes on a rainbow hue. It’s incredible, and it’s beautiful.
At first, I thought it was an anomaly, but every bird I saw had the same iridescence.
Look, I’ve seen thousands of hummingbirds. In fact, I see them every day here on Hackberry Farm. However, I am never surprised to learn something new about nature that i never knew before.
She’s always a great teacher.
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