Hummingbird Who Forgot to Pray

Came across these pictures online today and I thought they were crazy!

I bet this hummingbird was thinking he should have said his prayers last night!

From Bird Watcher’s Digest

Picture 1.

The mantis captures the bird with a swift swipe of its forelegs.

Picture 2.

The mantis impales the hummingbird’s chest with its foreclaws.

From the website:

Though we tend to think of hummingbirds as cute, dainty little things, in reality they make bold and fierce competitors. They don’t let their guard down for a moment while defending their territories from other hummingbirds. They must also watch out for other animals that might prey on them, such as American kestrels in North America or tarantulas in South America. Praying mantises are also known to capture and kill hummingbirds, as a reader from West Chester, Pennsylvania, describes. - Bird Watcher Digest

Mosaics Photos

I’ve been meaning to post about this since P&K’s wedding, they are back in Toronto opening their wedding gifts this weekend so that reminded me to do it.. . . . .I’ve been playing around with some Mosaics software recently. . . .
The first sample below is of P&K. It is made up of 13, 000 little photos of the two of them. I made the mosaic as a wedding present (hense why opening wedding presents reminded me). I printed it super large for P&K, its the size of half a door! You can see every single smaller image when you are up close to the picture. I was pretty proud of my efforts. . . .

The second one is draft I’m currently working on for CH2. Picture Mosaics are alot of fun, I am going to do one in the near future for Ryan as well, and probably do one up of the moggies too.

If you aren’t familar with picture mosaics, its creating one picture out of hundreds of tiny pictures. . . .

In the field of photographic imaging, a photomosaic is a picture (usually a photograph) that has been divided into (usually equal sized rectangular) sections, each of which is replaced with either a solid colour, or another image of appropriate average colour. When viewed at low magnifications, the individual pixels appear as the primary image, while close examination reveals that the image is in fact made up of many hundreds or thousands of smaller images. …

Read up on picture mosaics on Wikipedia (The term Photomosaic is trademarked by Runaway Technology, Inc.)