Wow, even I don’t like that one!
But you’re not here for the wordplay, you’re here for the month-end abstract. So let’s see, what do we have for the contestants?
While chasing the brood of Cooper’s hawks (Accipiter cooperii) that occupied Walkabout Estates, I snagged this motion-blurred example – image stabilizing lenses only work for the camera’s motion, not the subject’s. Had it not been for that head, it would have been a lot more difficult to determine what this even was.
I must note, by the way, that after making that post, I heard the young calling in the distance for a day or two, then nothing at all; they’ve left the area now, off on their own, so I’m glad I got what I did. This is contrasted against the red-shouldered hawks a few years back, who left the nest and vanished entirely – different species, different fledging habits.
And another, more abstracty.
This one does much better at higher resolution, and may become a large print that makes people go in close, because the web strands stay sharp – at least, within the focus range in the center. There are just enough details to make it work, for me anyway: the sparkle of the light off the strands, the parachute-like billow in the middle, the clarity of the web structure at lower left, and the curves of the highlights at lower center. It also helped that I was shooting with a wide open aperture, so the background got rendered in soft round blobs instead of aperture-shapes like pentagons or septagons. Little things, little things…