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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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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