Dragonflies and Hummingbirds

 

Retirement has given me more free time. I have used this to do more riding. Relax a little more and do more hiking. NJ has an amazing amount of interesting places to hike. One of the first thing I did when I retired was make a list of places I wanted to hike. A couple of weeks ago I checked off Ramapo State Park and Double Trouble State Park but I have a lot more to visit. 

This past Monday Laura had suggested doing a hike at Abbots Marshlands. It wasn't  on my list of places to hike but it looked interesting so I decided to do it. Abbots Marshland is on the Delaware river in Bordentown. As its name suggest it is a marshland along the river. There are a number of trails in and around the marshland. 

As we walked around we stopped for pictures of the water and plants around the marsh. Besides the usual spiders Laura was looking to get pictures of dragonflies. I was skeptical that we could get a picture of a dragonfly.  Dragonflies are hard to photograph as they usually don't sit still long enough for you to get a picture of them. We got a few pictures of them on the ground that weren't that good. Luckily we found one perched on the top of weed that stayed there for a few minutes as we took pictures. 

According to Laura this is a Blue Dasher dragonfly. All I know is that close up a dragonfly is very alien looking. I'm really happy with the pictures that I got. They show a lot of detail especially in the face and wings. Click on the picture if you want a closer look. I took this picture with my regular 18mm-150mm zoom lens which is not really meant for close up pictures so I might rent a macro lens to see if I can do even better. 

Besides dragonflies we took a few scenic pictures of the rivers and lakes.

 

We ended up doing a 3.5 mile hike. Although this place wasn't on my hiking list I will probably come back again some other time as it was an interesting and scenic place for a easy hike.

 

I don't always have to go hiking to take pictures of wildlife sometimes they come to me. My wife has a lot of flowers on our back patio which does attract some hummingbirds. The problem is they fly around really fast and you never know when they are going to show up. I decided to spend a half hour quietly sitting on my patio toward the end of the day when hummingbirds sometimes show up and I got lucky.

 

The key to getting a good shot of a hummingbird is to make sure you have a high shutter speed so you can freeze the motion. You also need to shoot in rapid fire mode, taking as many pictures per second as you camera can handle so you can get lucky and capture them in a good pose. 

I probably took a least 100 shots to get these two pictures. There is a lot luck involved in getting a shot of a hummingbird and it does take some practice. These shot are okay but with a little more practice and luck I should be able to do better. I do enjoy these hikes and photography challenges and am happy I have more time to do these things now that I'm retired.