The Battle of Technologies: Hummingbirds and Cameras

Hummingbirds, photography

 

 

As I said, I went to the English Country Garden to meet friends and pursue hummingbirds. It was a glorious day.  The Best of Times? Pretty close. Yet, the clear blue skies provided a distinct challenge. As a result, inside the gardens the plants soaked in sunlight and spread deep shadows underneath their branches and leaves.  Photographers call this contrasty light. Cameras really can’t match the variation from bright sunlight to dark shadow very well. The camera’s light meter is challenged to pronounce what would be an appropriate lens opening to allow in just the “right” amount of light for the instant the aperture is open. And it really is an instant.

 

And as you follow a hummingbird, if you are able to do the right setting chances every second. The aperture of a camera lets in the light. It is opened and closed by the shutter. The longer the. shutter is open the more light is allowed in. The shorter time the shutter speed is opened the less light is allowed in.  In my camera, the shutter of the Nikon Z8 can be opened as little as 1/32,000 of a second. Think of that. It is an incredible short period of time. Even shorter time than a hummingbird’s wings will beat. The electronic shutter is much faster! This is incredible technology.

 

As well, the technology of my camera is designed so that one can continuously, within limits, track and keep a bird in focus!  It focuses on the eyes. The most important part of a bird to keep in focus.  But it does require the operator—me in other words—to keep the camera lens aimed at the bird while it flits in and out of the flowers in the park. This is a Herculean task. Actually, impossible. The camera can only focus on those eyes while the lens is “looking” at the bird. If it flits into the shadow or behind a flower or behind a leaf it is “lost.”  The camera will focus on the next nearest thing—like a leaf you don’t care about.

This is a battle royal between technologies. The technology of the hummingbird is astounding. The hummingbird is as described as “the most remarkable things on 2 wings” by a documentary film I watched on PBS called Magic in the Air.  The film also said they are “intriguing, enchanting and utterly captivating.” All of that is true.

Hummingbirds are so fast that they rarely provide more than a fleeting glimpse to the observer. That is a pity because there is much to see. It also made, I found out, my task of pointing my camera lens at the hummingbirds at the right time, incredibly difficult. They were there and then they were gone. I seemed to always be behind them. By the end of the afternoon, I was convinced that despite my fancy camera I would get no images at all. Just air and leaves and shadows. That is what I feared. I feared these were indeed the worst of times. And I wanted the best of times. It seemed to me an impossible task.

The camera  also had another technological trick up its  sleeve.  The camera could repeatedly lift the shutter and expose an image at astonishing speeds. Over and over again! I could set the camera to automatically fire a burst of images on merely touching the shutter button.  And it would keep firing away repeatedly at amazing speeds.  Mistakenly, I had set the camera to keep firing away at the highest level—10 to 20 frames per second. Imagine that, the camera would be set up to photograph that many images with one press of the shutter. The camera could make all the calculations of shutter speed that fast.  Over and over again. It was incredible.

Later I realized, when I looked at the images from my camera card on my computer, I had actually caught some pretty good images. At least by my lowly standards.  The camera had been faster than I. the technology of the camera was far better than the Hans Neufeld technology. It managed to capture some images of these illusive birds.

 

September 2, 2024: Mother Nature was not cooperating

 

All of these problems were exasperated by the incredible winds. If the hummingbird landed on a branch in the sun, as it did from time to time, it was only for a brief moment. And then, as often as not the wind moved the branch a great distance and the bird somehow managed to hang on for dear light. Of course, by then, the camera lens was no longer pointed at the bird, but that darned tree again.

 

This was the most amazing race of technologies.  The Bird was holding its own however. If would alight on a branch or hover in front of a flower for just the briefest moment before moving on. I was profoundly challenged to keep up. This was the real amazing race.

 

However, the birds had one flaw which made it almost impossible to grab an image in focus.  They would constantly be chasing each other. These tiny hummingbirds are amazingly territorial. Even though there was an abundance of nectar—the nectar of the Gods, yet each bird would try to chase away each competitor. That I show they have evolved. Don’t let any other bird get your nectar!  Even if it means you are wasting an in incredible amount of time in which you could be fueling up, you were instead chasing the competition away. This was insanity.

 

This was insane.  Each bird in the garden could easily find plenty of flowers for itself. Hummingbirds are the tiniest birds in the western hemisphere.  A baby hummingbird is about as heavy as a post-it note! As soon as they can fly, they are constantly on the move.  They stop for very short and infrequent rest stops. Like this bird posing for me in the sun. Mocking me and my feeble efforts.

 

[1] “Magic in the Air”, PBS

The Best of Times and the Worst of Time

Hummingbirds, photography

 

I was extremely pleased to get this photograph

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

― Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities

In some respects, I have experienced the summer from Hell. And I don’t want to stay in Hell any longer. In other respects, it has been the summer from Heaven and I want a lot more of it. Like Charles Dickens said, “They were the best of times; they were the worst of times.”

 

The troubles started at the end of 2023 when I accidentially pitched myself down the stairs in our home, and, frankly, was lucky to be alive and not paralyzed. I had literally sailed down the stairs head first until it collided abruptly with hard prejudice, against the bulkhead, leaving a big hole where my head hit. I hit the bulk head nearly 7 feet above the stair underneatb where the collision occurred. That pitched me back onto my ample derriere and slid the rest of way down. Hitting that board, I now believe saved me from more grievous injury. I lay there utterly defeated, but without broken bones or paralysis. I think I was lucky. Very lucky.

 

I did however have a torn meniscus which interfered with my enjoyment. Then I carelessly affixed my camera to its tripod on the patio of the house we were renting in San Tan Valley Arizona and it fell relegating it to the dump heap. I did have an old spare camera, but I was grumpy.

 

As a result, I was unable to do the things in Arizona that I liked the most. Except for attending Arizona State University and numerous (too numerous?) happy hour with friends. I was not able to swim the breas stroke and hiking was very difficult.

 

When we got back to Canada I was determined to buy a new camera and a better one at that. That is what I did. And it was a dandy camera.  Much too expensive for a schlep photographer like me to be honest. Then I made a bad mistake. I jammed the camera’s adapter into my best lens, which I needed to photography wild flowers and the two were stuck.  Like lovers in a loveless marriage. I wasted most of the summer to get the lens and adapter repaired. The details are a long pitiless story which I will spare my faithful readers.

 

Finally, a couple of days ago, I was back in business. I went to the English Country Garden at the Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg to try to photograph hummingbirds. The camera has some special awesome technology that makes it ideal for that purpose.

 

However, because of my malfeasance and making my fantastic camera unavailable for most of the summer, I had been unable to complete the steep learning curve to figure out how to fully use this technical marvel of a camera. I had learned the basics most of which I had sadly forgotten.  I realize, as a result, that any attempts to capture images of the extremely illusive hummingbirds at the English Country Garden.  I realized I would have to learn on the fly. And I knew this would not be easy. I feared my mental technology was not upto the photo technology.

 

I went with my friend, Sheldon Emberly and his friend, who I think is now also my friend,  Bev Giesbrecht. These people had already been photographing humming birds for 2 hours before I got there. And they got some great shots. Needless to say, I was jealous.

I feared it would be the worst of times.

 

To be continued.

 

No room for Moderates in the Tea Party

Extremism, Right-wing Extremism

 

The tea party came out in force to oppose Obama’s health care plan. As Justin Ling said,

“Glen Beck leaned in hard on Tea Party populism. He leads a tax revolt march on Washington, he hosts another huge rally. He started something called the 9-12 project…The Tea Party fueled by right-wing radio begins to think of themselves as actual revolutionaries.”

 

They saw themselves as involved in a civil war for control of the country, not just the Republican Party. They believed the establishment in both parties was fighting back against them. They claimed to be fighting against the leadership of both parties to take their power away and give it back to the people where it belonged.

Radical Republicans challenged moderate Republican incumbents and were celebrated on Right-wing radio. This was changing the political landscape, not unlike the rise of the Trumpsters after Donald Trump was defeated in the 2020 presidential election. A good example was Mike Castle who was called a Republican in name only (RINO’) because he was not radical enough. Rush Limbaugh supported Christine O’Donnell in the Republican primary in Delaware even though she was not much of a candidate and he raised $1million for her campaign in one day! It did not matter who was the better candidate. Talk Radio loved the pure and extreme. What did matter was who was the more extreme Republican? They wanted the most extreme.  The Tea Party ushered in a new era of extremism in Republican politics.

At its height there were 60 Tea Partiers in the House and a dozen in the Senate. They were a radical force to be reckoned with.

As Justin Ling said,

“Right-wing radio sent representatives to Washington who had no time for compromise with the Democrats or even the moderates in their own party. The Tea Party forced Republicans in safe districts to look over their right shoulder and fend off challenges from the conservative fringe. It made the business of governing increasingly difficult. And that was partly the point. This antipathy to government and this all or nothing ideology would play a crucial role in fracturing American politics and fueling the insurrection on January 6th.”

 

 

There really has been little room for moderates ever since, particularly in primary contests, where every Republican politician fears extremists. Never moderates. Only candidates more extreme than them can defeat them. In my opinion this sad fact is a major contributor to the rise of extremism and polarization in America.

The Tea Party: A Populist Uprising from the Right

Right-wing Extremism

 

When Barack Obama took office as president of the United States he inherited from his predecessor George W. Bush a financial disaster of epic lineage. Many traders said they had never seen a day like it. I admit he had to take quick action and did not have adequate time to think things through. It is difficult to do the rational thing in the midst of general panic.

Obama immediately took action to quell the disaster. Now some of the things he did were dubious. For example, he arranged for massive  bailouts of businesses that had caused the market tank while being much less generous with ordinary people who could not pay their mortgages.

One month after his inauguration, in February of 2009, an event occurred when the  an analyst named Rick Santelli was heard live on CNBC the financial news network, standing on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and said this:

I have a proposed modification. You know the new administration is big on computers and technology. How about this: Let’s put up a website on the Internet to have a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ or would we like to at least buy cars and houses in foreclosure and give them to people who might actually have a chance to prosper down the road and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water…We are thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July.

It really was a plea for the ordinary people who got screwed by paying for bailouts for rich bankers while they got no help at all. It was a legitimate cry for justice for those that Obama ignored in his rush to save the financial system.  This later morphed into the Tea Party which of course was another failure to drain the swamp in favour of feeding the swamp creatures with expensive caviar and champaign. But they had a point. A very good poiiint in fact.

Donald Trump would later repeat exactly the same thing when he promised to help the little guys by draining the swamp and actually rewarded the wealthy with deep tax cuts instead. This is what has happened over and over again in American politics and Obama was not immune.

Republicans actually took this idea to heart and organized an informal Tea Party, but their efforts were of course confined to working for the rich rather than the ordinary citizens of the US. For a few years they were very powerful on Capitol Hill and were a definite thorn in the side of Obama.

According to Justin Ling  in his podcast “Tehe Flamethrowers,” where he went through the history of the right wing in talk radio said Mark Williams became the defacto leader of the Tea Party. The Daily News said this about him: “the flamethrower leading the battle against the Ground Zero mosque, was kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation Saturday for a racist blog post.” Williams  started out as a radio commentator in Sacramento where he took over from Rush Limbaugh.  He organized a series of rallies across the country to celebrate Tax Day, the day that supposedly people had paid their taxes on their earnings so they started to work after that for themselves. It was a grass roots Republican uprising. And they loved dressing up in the regalia of the American revolutionaries. Wearing their tri-corner hats, breeches while carrying muskets and crying to reduce taxes, smaller government, and support individual liberty. It really was a bit of a party–for awhile.

 

The birther Conspiracy and the Star of 30,000 Lies

Right-wing Extremism, Trust and Distrust

 

The birther conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not in the United States, and hence an illegitimate president, was born out of racist beliefs that it was not possible for America to have elected a black man for the office of president, and drove the consumers of talk radio to fits of apoplectic anger against the black usurper in the White House. It just was not possible for America to have voted for him they thought.

In June 2008 the Obama campaign released a copy of Obama’s birth certificate from Hawaii, but the conspiracy theory had legs and could not be beaten down with a stick. As Justin Ling said in his CBC Podcast Flamethrowers, , “But on right-wing radio, hosts could smell blood in the water. They claimed the certificate had obviously been heavily photo-shopped. No way was it genuine.” It just could not be genuine.

Jerome Corsi became an “expert” on this conspiracy theory.  Nothing could be said to convince his followers of the falsity of this theory. They claimed that Obama’s mother had to go to Kenya before he was born, and the pregnancy was so advanced she had to stay there for his birth in Kenya.  After all, why did Obama not release the original birth certificate? In fact, as Ling said, during the campaign, “Corsi went to Kenya on some kind of Scooby-do mission to find ‘the real birth certificate.” He ended up being detained and eventually deported from Kenya because he did not have a proper visa for being there. That deportation of course was part of the conspiracy.  In the world of conspiracy, it is almost impossible to deflect the theory. Any obstacles can quickly be swallowed up and dutifully explained as obviously being part of the conspiracy.

Corsi was an American author and participant in many conspiracies. See for example, the HBO Documentary Film, After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News (2020) for more on this colorful conspiracist. Corsi next flew to Hawaii where his grandmother was reported to be sick because he wanted to track down the original genuine birth certificate. As Justin Ling said, “these radio personalities were on the radio day in and day out telling their listeners that the likely next president was illegitimate, foreign, and not one of us.” That was the key, a black president could not be one of us! Another commentator called him an illegal alien who should be arrested and deported!

 

Of course, at this time, a failed presidential candidate from 2000 jumped on the birther band wagon.  Donald Trump began to lead this absurd campaign. Or as Ling called him: “the real estate developer, fake university chancellor, purveyor of staged reality TV star” was claiming Obam was a fraud! Or as other reporters liked to call Trump “the star of 30,000 lies.”

 

Trump jumped into the fray and “earned” a lot of international publicity as a result. He even said he sent his own people to Hawaii to investigate and promised he would present the evidence. Naturally, it goes without saying, he never presented any evidence. Evidence is beneath Trump. Truth is beneath him.

 

As Ling said, “Call it what you will, a meaningless diversion, a pernicious racist conspiracy theory with no basis in fact. Whatever it was, Donald Trump was now the head of it.” And right-wing talk radio was going crazy over it!

 

Perhaps the most important part of Trump’s ridiculous campaign was to imprint on his supporters that the election of Obama was illegitimate and hence his entire presidency was illegitimate. As result millions of people doubted whether the presidential election of Obama was legitimate.  They lost whatever trust in the government they had, and trust in government in a democracy is essential to it working. In my view, this has had long-term effects to this day.

 

Barack Obama: the ideal enemy

Hate, Right-wing Extremism

 

I am meandering back to the history of far-right extremism particularly on American Talk radio.

 Of course, all of this rage machine was just the opening act for what was to come. As Justin Ling said on the CBC podcast series, “If you can turn a hurricane victim into a victim of rage, Barack Obama is going to be a piece of cake!”  Remember that is precisely what the far right did in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. As Ling said,  

“Barack Obama was really an easy target.  Most importantly he was black. But he was also a liberal; he had gone to an elite eastern university (Harvard); he was a lawyer turned liberal politician. His last name was weird. But—this is BIG—his middle name is Hussein.’

 

As Ling said, “Right-wing radio could not have found a more ideal enemy.” These right-wing pundits and their listeners became apoplectic at the thought of this black man and his family in the White House!  This could not be! Something was horribly wrong. And the right-wing movement intended to right this horrible wrong.

These right-wing pundits made it absolutely clear to their listeners that this was something to fear. They should be worried. The blacks were taking over “their” country!

 Radio host Bill Cunningham told his listeners, Obama in the White House was like this:

 “Now my fellow Americans this is the day we have been waiting for. Much like Castro took over Cuba. Mao Tse Tung took over Red China. And the communists took over Russia.”

 

Cunningham called his squeaky-clean election “a bloodless coup.” He referred to it as “seizing power.”

Right-wing pundits like Michael Savage claimed he was setting up a civilian police force as large as the US military. He likened him to Adolf Hitler even before he took office! He said Obama wanted to bring in “a Marxist revolution.”  Right-wing pundits were bathing in the murky waters of hysteria. And racial anxiety had a lot to do with it.

There was only one thing that made sense of this hysteria about Obama.  It was the hidden presumption—a black man just could not be a legitimate president of the country. This could not be tolerated. This was why the birther movement, in which Donald Trump had played such an important part, just could not tolerate the thought of a black president and a black family in the White House. Some actually referred to them as “monkeys in the White House!”

As Ling said, “racist dog whistles were a constant refrain in the election” of 2008. One said “his [Obama] father was a typical black father who right after the birth left the baby. That’s what black fathers do; they simply leave.” As Ling said, “this stuff is hard to hear, but a lot of people enjoyed hearing it. It reinforced their racist beliefs. It gave them permission to say this stuff out loud. And in some cases, it even changed people’s thinking.”

Gordon Liddy went on the air to say that Obama’s childhood made him a threat to America. He said that over in Indonesia at a Catholic School he was listed as a Muslim. “He was in Indonesia, which is Muslim country, until about 10.” They considered Barack Obama, whom they usually called by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, to give their claims the full authority, that he must be Muslim.

I remember at the time, a client of mine, who was a truck driver driving throughout the United States and constantly listened to talk radio, particularly the revered Rush Limbaugh, and received absolutely assurance that Obama was a Muslim. There was no doubt about that.

I remember a client of mine, a long-distance truck driver, who once told me solemnly that Barack Obama was a Muslim.  Until then I had never heard of the birther conspiracy. I had never considered the effect of talk radio either at that time. My eyes were opened.

This kind of smear had dogged Obama throughout his life, according to Justin Ling, and “it wouldn’t go away because these right-wing radio hosts were peddling anger. Anger was their business…And Obama was great for business.” People like Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh, and other rightwing radio hosts and kooks opened a barrier to a phenomenal wave of resentment in the American people. It rushed across the country. At first the only people who noticed were the people who listened to it.  Soon the rest of us found out about it as well. American was changing and going farther to the extreme right.

The Proud History of Libraries 

Freedom to Read

 

Libraries have a proud history of defending the freedom to read. Richard Ovenden was justifiably proud of his own library’s participation in just defence. Ovenden is the 25th Bodley’s Librarian, director of libraries at the University of Oxford. In the 1660s and 1670s it was in fact Milton’s books that were the subject of book banning.  All copies of his books were ordered to be burned. This seems remarkable today as Milton is considered one of  England’s greatest poets and one of Christendom’s strongest intellectual supporters. A predecessor Head Librarian Thomas Hyde bravely and perhaps even foolishly, refused to obey the Royal order, when he refused to surrender to the flames a special copy of Milton’s works including one that had been presented to the second Head Librarian by John Milton himself

 

As Ovenden said,

 

“libraries are proud to protect the freedom of all writers. While fighting to protect their right to write, and publish whatever they want to, they protect the freedom of readers to read them.”

The freedom to write and the freedom to read are of course opposite sides of the same coin—the coin of freedom.

 

In Manitoba, as far as I know libraries have all resisted misguided efforts from Christian evangelicals to ban books they disapproved of. We should be proud of them too.   And defend then when necessary.

 

 

 

The Holocaust and Books

Freedom to Read

 

The Holocaust that followed the book burning in 1933 was likely the greatest and most well-resourced attack on books and learning in world history. As Richard Ovenden said in his lecture at the Toronto Library:

 

“It was estimated that 100 million books were destroyed during the Holocaust.  These attacks on knowledge were a cultural and intellectual genocide that prefigured the human genocide that would soon follow.”

 

These truths must not be forgotten. We must remember them when the freedom to read is challenged as it is now in many places in North America including so far, Winkler, Winnipeg, and Brandon 1 in Manitoba. As Ovenden said,

The current wave in book banning and the broader context of censor[1]ship and constraints around freedom of expression are all stark reminders that the techniques used in Nazi Germany are once again in fashion.

Who would ever have thought that Neo-Nazism would find such a comfortable home in North America? This is an important reminder that fascism is never dead. The best we can do is tamp it down for a spell. We must never assume that it is permanently erased. It is always able to be resurrected when conditions are right.  As Ovenden added,

 

“Suppressing freedom to read is a core tactic used by those who seek to exercise authoritarian control over societies. Let’s be clear; it is our minds that are the true battlefield and libraries are a good proxy for those. As John Milton wrote in Areopagitica in 1644 in response to the English Parliament imposing a restrictive printing ordinance:

“For books are not absolutely dead things but do contain a potency of life within them. To be as active as that soul whose progeny they are, nay they do preserve us in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that intellect that bred them.”

 

If you love books you must love freedom and be ready to protect the right to read.