One Moment in Time

A 1/640th-of-a-second-thin sliver from a beautiful, sunny February day.

The thing about photographing hummingbirds is that, besides being beautifully irridescent, small and cute, they generally move way faster than we can move a camera. And even when they are hovering in place, there's still a lot of uncertainty to each photo. Even if the shutter is fast enough to catch something more than the photographic equivalent of a probability curve of where the wings might be, there's no way to predict just how the hummingbird will be posing on the still photo.

Maybe that is one of the things that is so appealing about photography, though. In a world where time always seems to be moving, something as simple as a camera gives us the power to stop time, to essentially freeze for eternity a thin slice of our reality that we can then share with everyone around us.

Definitely not the best shot of a hummingbird, but certainly my best so far (and, as these things tend to go, captured when I really wasn't looking to photo birds at all, but just happened upon one at Huntington).