Mokka mit Schlag

Yesterday at the Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary in Modjeska Canyon, I spent a lot of time looking at this hummingbird:

The classic distinction between a male Anna’s and a male Costa’s is that the Anna’s has a red gorget while the Costa’s has a purple gorget. The problem is that the much more common (around here at least) Anna’s male can also seem purple depending on angle and light. More than once I’ve sat and watched a hummingbird’s gorget switch from purple to red to purple to red to black to purple to red as it moved its head around. At this point I am extremely cautious about calling any Orange County hummingbird a Costa’s without an expert standing next to me to confirm the ID.

However this hummingbird shows purple in all my photographs and in the field. It never really looked red to me at all. Its gorget did, surprisingly, sometimes look copper, which is a color I’ve never seen on an Anna’s. I’m almost ready to stick my gorget out and call it a Costa’s except that according to Sibley, another distinguishing mark is that the wingtips of the Costa’s extend all the way to the tail tip, while on the Anna’s they’re a bit short. Damn. These wingtips clearly don’t extend all the way to the tail tip, though perhaps that’s a function of the angle or how the bird holds its wings at any given moment?

On the other hand, the more I look at this bird the more it looks violet and Costa’s like and the less Anna’s like it looks. I’m stumped. Anyone want to call this one?

I shoot raw images with an EOS50D. I load them off the card using Lightroom 2.0. Then I start paging through them. The first time I see a photo it’s a plausible, nice neutral tone. Then Lightroom thinks for a few seconds while displaying the message “Loading…”, adjusts something, and the whole photo is suddenly a lot redder than it should be.

How do I tell Lightroom not to do this? Whatever it’s doing, it’s screwing with the proper color balance of the photos. The photos seem clearly better before Lightroom mucks with them. I can usually get back to some semblance of what the photo should be by adjusting tone and temperature and such in the Develop mode; but why should I have to? The photos started out fine until Lightroom mangled them. Any ideas?

I skipped Moth Monday last week because, although I had a couple of good new moths, no one had ID’d them yet. A week later and they still haven’t been ID’d though, so maybe it’s time to post one here and see what folks think. This is from Mountain View Shoreline in Santa Clara County, just off the salt ponds, about 6:00 A.M.:

One thing I like about moth photos is that even when a moth is very nondescript in nature, something the eye just passes over, look closer with the camera and it’s quite stunning. There are many little brown moths that we usually ignore but they’re worth a closer look.

Attempting to install Lord of the Rings Online for the first time on a fairly stock Vista system, and the installer fails while updating some Visual C++ runtime library. When are we going to learn that we should not depend on the latest versions of every single library? Software should simply not require users to upgrade their libraries. (I say this having just shipped a product that fails on Java 5 on the Mac but succeeds on Java 6, so I’m hardly blameless here. The bug is really Apple’s fault, but we should have worked around it. Update: looks like a colleague fixed that a few hours ago. Cool.)

However, the real WTF is this error message I got while the installer was updating the files:

Naturally, I can’t copy and paste that URL. I’m supposed to type it into my web browser. More likely I just won’t play the game and try Warhammer instead.
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Moth Monday time again. This next moth is gorgeous and showy but has a really annoying habit of showing up on the shady side of buildings behind fences completely out of reach of my lens/flash combo Unless I set the ISO way too high. :-(

Smerinthus cerisyi – One-eyed Sphinx – Hodges#7822
Santiago Oaks Regional Park, 2009-04-11
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