I don’t have anything new on the high-speed photo front, but I’ll come up with something eventually. In the meantime, here are a few more bees and hummingbirds. First up, a hummingbird:

This picture shows the bird’s back and tail, for our birding folks who keep saying they need to see this. Hopefully we can now determine once and for all which type of hummingbird this is.

Next up is a very good freeze frame of a bee in flight:

The curvature of the lower wing is, I’m pretty sure, an artifact of how the shutter works at high speeds. The camera’s firmware allegedly compensates for this effect, called “rolling shutter,” to produce a proper rendering of reality. This fine piece of Sony marketing explains:

Most of the time this works as advertised. Every once in a while, though, it can’t quite fix things properly, and you get some curvature in very fast moving objects. That’s what happened here.

Finally, here’s another bee, just because.

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