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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DECEMBER IS MAKE OR BREAK

A full one-third of our annual fundraising comes in this month alone. That’s risky, because a strong December means our newsroom is on the beat and reporting at full strength—but a weak one means budget cuts and hard choices ahead.

With only days left until December 31, we've raised about half of our $400,000 goal—but we need a huge surge in reader support to close the remaining gap. Whether you've given before or this is your first time, your contribution right now matters.

Managing an independent, nonprofit newsroom is staggeringly hard. There’s no cushion in our budget—no backup revenue, no corporate safety net. We can’t afford to fall short, and we can’t rely on corporations or deep-pocketed interests to fund the fierce, investigative journalism Mother Jones exists to do. That’s why we need you right now. Please chip in to help close the gap.

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