We have been enjoying watching the hummingbirds visiting the feeder on our RV while camped in the outer reaches of Phoenix, Arizona, lately. These little guys are very cheeky and rather bossy for such a diminutive creature — loads of fun to watch!

Whenever we’re parked in hummingbird territory, we hang a window-mounted hummingbird feeder on the outside of the window. It’s a clever design with a little suction cup on it that makes it very easy to put on (and get off) an RV’s windows. Best of all, it gives us front row seats for a “dinner-and-a-show” at every meal!

Right now, a little male and female have been politely taking turns at the feeder, so one or the other of them has been at the feeder at every hour all day long! Yesterday Mark was outside and got a pic of the female taking a drink while hovering over the feeder. He caught her reflection in our window perfectly, so the photo looks like there are two birds at the feeder. But there is just one!

One bird or two?
The real bird is on the left and her reflection in our window is on the right!

Hummingbirds are about the easiest birds to feed, and they are perfect travel companions for RVers because it takes so little to attract them. They like a super simple formula of one part white sugar to four parts water. And that’s it! No need for fancy hummingbird food. We put a mark on our feeder for how much water to fill it with. We usually start with a little bit of warm water in the bottom so the sugar dissolves. Then we fill it the rest of the way with cooler water so they don’t burn their tongues!

Getting a drink!

For more fun pics of hummingbirds at our window feeder, here’s a post I wrote a while ago about doing “wildlife” photography and shooting hummingbirds from inside our rig: To Catch a Hummingbird.

 
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We have been busy around town in Phoenix lately, totally caught up in the hustle and bustle of urban affairs. For the moment, our idyllic life of rural RV travel feels very far away!  However, all we have to do is stop and listen to the birds singing in the trees and grab a camera to capture a little beauty here and there, and the frenzy of city life subsides.

Mark found these lovely flowers while out on a walk the other morning…

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We get a huge kick out of messing with our photos, and there are loads of software tools out there that can give your photos a really fun twist. We use Adobe’s Lightroom software for managing our libraries of photos (we each take about 35,000 photos a year, so keeping track of all these photos is quite a job!). Lightroom is also a fabulous tool for touching up the photos so they look their best.

Some folks may feel that post-processing photos on the computer is “cheating,” but it is actually half of the skill set needed for making great images. Composition and exposure of the photo is only the first half, and the hours spent post-processing on the computer are comparable to time film photographers used to spend in the darkroom years ago. Ansel Adams was famous for spending days in his darkroom tweaking his photos, and he even wrote a book about it called The Print. Likewise, modern photographers spend days on their computers!

Mark recently took a photo of the side of a building in Phoenix that was interesting for its shadows and patterns:

This photo has some interesting lines and shapes…

He decided to play with it a little bit using a very cool software tool called Topaz Adjust. With just a few mouse clicks he transformed the photo from the one above to the one below.

…WOW !!

Yowza!! It looks like some exotic underwater scene in an aquarium! Of course, getting wild and extreme like this isn’t for every photographer or for every photograph, but it sure is fun to play with!!