A Personal Challenge

Finding a blip subject and then capturing the best possible shot of it by taking many photos, then reviewing and editing them, is something I enjoy very much.

Washing floors, cleaning bathrooms, doing laundry, and other repetitive, non-creative household tasks rank much, much lower. However, they do have to be done.

So today the challenge I set myself was NOT to go back out to the garden and try to improve on my blip photo. Sometimes "good enough" is OK.

This is one of our local rufous hummingbirds making the rounds of the nectar-filled blossoms of the fuschia-flowering gooseberry (Ribes speciosum) in our front garden. Native to California, these evergreen shrubs do well here despite our very different weather. Their thorns are formidable, making pruning a slow and careful process, but the hummingbirds zip in and out with no problem.

Here's a closer look at this hummingbird, one of two males that visit our feeder many times each day. A female holds her own with them in the "easy eating" provided by the feeder. We never tire of watching them!