Without a doubt, the hardest subject I've ever tried to photograph...Give me birds in flight any day..
I took about 40 shots of these guys at sunset last night and these are the best I could do. The wind didn't help but these guys are so fast and zippy they sit still for less than a second.
What I like about them is how they fly up into your face and hover there to check you out before going back to the flowers..
I added two shots, the last two, as the only ever good shots I've taken of them..and both of them are BIF which surprised me as well.

The final addition to the "studio"
First: My setup will not make the small slices That Sippy Jug gets, and it was not intended too, But it does allow me to get sharper images of the subjects I shoot!!!
The reason for this setup was I am lazy 😉 and I want to be able to make changes easier when I am setting up a shot without getting up to move the subject manually.

This should be my last change, in the other post I had a small lightweight cross slide "milling" table supporting the. Camera with a nikkor 200mm f4 macro lens, due to the weight of the rig the milling table adjustments would bind.
And I thank Sippyjug for putting me on to the table because it work and was in my price range.
The rail in the photograph retails for $419 and is OVER KILL, but it is stable and I now have electronic control over all of the movements for the camera. I did find this rail on Facebook Market Place for $100 and a 140 mile round trip!!
I did replace the had wheel with a stepper motor for approx,$40 and a couple of hours labor.
I put the final touches on this at 4:30 this morning
The controller is the little white box on the left of the bench, I gives me fore and aft , left and right movements and allows me to rotate the subject CW or CCW.
The little controller on the right controls the Fore and aft, left & right and up & down movements of the "stage".
Plus manual coarse movements of the stage.

After a heavy computer crash, which I traced back to a motherboard failure, I decided to upgrade my main computer.

So I purchased a brand new i9-13900K CPU, a good Gigabyte B760 motherboard, a couple of 2TG SSD's, a couple of 40TB HDD's , a 4090 GPU, 128 GB DDR5 RAM and 1 KW PSU for good measure.

Because of the amount of purchase, my supplier tossed in a Windows 11 license for free.

Reluctant, after building my system and playing around with that pesky Windows 11 sticker, I decided to give it a try.

What a rubbish!

Bad, really bad user interface if you need many programs for work. No way to organize, change, customize, no nothing. I had to purchase "Start11" ap to make it almost as usable as Windows 10.

It does nasty things to the files. Without asking: for example: I copied all my photos and videos to the E: drive (the 40 TB's HDD's configured as RAID) ... the next morning I had a "no sapce left on drive" error on the C: drive. What had happened? Windows decided that photos should be backed up in OneDrive, so it moved everything to C:\Users \<my_user>\Onedrive\Pictures **without asking **

As I tried to move them back, Windows 11 refused with a stupid error message stating that it was an amovible linkl included. ** I HAD TO MANUALLY SHUT DOWN ONE DRIVE, AND PERFORM A REGISTRY TRICK TO BRING ALL THE FILES BACK TO WHERE THEY BELONG**

After that, Windows complained that there was a Backup error, every time I accessed the folder. So I killed OneDrive altogether and deleted it from disk (after another PoweShell+Registry hack)

Windows 11 came with Copilot installed and activated (It's a MS rebranding of ChatGPT ), so I asked this question to the bot: "Why is Windows 11 so bad?"

And this was it sincere answer:

Windows 11 is the latest operating system from Microsoft, released on October 5, 2021. It has been praised for its clean design and improved performance, but it has also received a lot of criticism from users who are unhappy with some of its features and limitations. Some of the reasons why Windows 11 is so bad are:

High hardware requirements: Windows 11 demands some minimum hardware requirements that many current computers do not meet, such as a 64-bit processor with at least two cores and 1 GHz of frequency, 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of storage space, a graphics card compatible with DirectX 12 and a TPM 2.0 security module. These requirements exclude many old or low-end devices that work perfectly with Windows 10, and force users to buy a new PC or stick with the previous system12.
Performance and compatibility issues: Windows 11 has arrived with several bugs and errors that affect the performance and compatibility of the devices that install it. For example, a performance loss has been detected in AMD Ryzen processors, which is due to a problem with the power plan of Windows 112. There have also been problems with printers, which stop working or give errors when printing2. In addition, some applications and games do not work properly or simply do not run on Windows 11, such as some Android emulators3.
Changes in the interface and functions: Windows 11 has introduced some changes in the interface and functions that nobody asked for and that make the user experience worse. For example, the taskbar is less customizable and functional, the context menus are inconsistent and cluttered, the default apps settings are complicated and tedious, and the Microsoft account is mandatory to use the system124.
These are some of the main complaints that users have about Windows 11. However, there may be more issues that have not been discovered or reported yet. Windows 11 is still a new and unfinished system, and it may improve over time with updates and fixes. However, for now, many users prefer to stay with Windows 10 or look for alternatives.

*** BOTTOM LINE ***

For or those folks which are asking about upgrading to Windows 11, ** DO NOT DARE TO **

Beware, I found many more problems as the one described above.

End of the experiment. I'll be throwing Windows 11 away... together with Windows 95, Vista and Windows 8.

All in all I'm a Linux sysadmin and developer, I don't need to go through this s**t.

Stepping away from comparing specs, is there a camera that you just like?

It could be ease of use, results, handling, fun to use or any of those and more. It may even be a camera that you return to even when, by some measures, it is obsolete.

My 2012 Pentax X-5 "Superzoom" 16 MP bridge camera is one. I was surprised they were still going for around $120 when most others from that time were $30.

Fast handling, easy control, but not much manual exposure options and a decent lens. It does have some visual highlight/shadow warnings that are handy in the less-than-perfect EVF. More than once I've returned to it, or rediscovered shots taken with it that I liked.

Thoughts?

I know that I will be getting good advice from my UHH colleagues. I was tasked by my daughter with to recommend a large format printer to buy. She wants a printer with 17" minimum width. She's leaning towards a Canon but I've heard good things from Epson printers.
Although her photo taking abilities, eye and creativity, have long surpassed my own, she still depends on dad for equipment advice and in this case I am delegating this on you. Her camera is a Fuji GFX50R.
Looking forward to your input
Claude

Where we you 60 years ago today, November 22, 1963?

I was 16-years old and a Junior in high school. I was in physics class when they announced that President Kennedy had been shot. Keep in mind that we were in Northern Michigan and it was in the middle of deer season, so the first comments that we made between ourselves was that we didn't know Kennedy was a hunter, since for us, the only time we ever heard of someone getting shot was because of a hunting accident (there's no question that we were living sheltered lives). It was maybe 30-minutes later, when I was in study hall, that it was announced that Kennedy was dead and that it had taken place in Dallas.

About 15-minutes after that, they announced that classes had been cancelled and that the buses would soon be taking us home. We were also informed that since it was Friday, and that Thanksgiving was the following Thursday, that school would be closed for the entire week, instead of the just the originally planned two-days, Thursday and Friday.

I was working in a local grocery store/meat market at the time and being in an area where a lot of hunters came for deer season, we were pretty busy, so my boss asked me to come in and work most of the days that I had off (I was already scheduled to work the weekends and after school so in the end, it was only a few extra hours). We had a TV at the store and we watched most of the news programs covering the activities of the week. Of course, everyone who came into the store had to stop, look at what was going on and express their opinions and views, to say nothing about speculating what actually happened and who was ultimately responsible. While the term 'conspiracy theory' was not yet part of our lexicon, you could see how stuff like that got started and what perpetuated it.

One of my volunteer photography "jobs" was as the official photog for a wonderful organisation called, United Way. The Original group was started in the US by Dolly Parton.
The aim of the group was to get parents to read aloud to their young children, they discovered that this encouraged children to go on to higher education.
I spent many very happy times visiting various places with some of Australia's best children's books authors.
I really got to the love the kids and the activities we did.
Here are just a few pics of some of the beautiful children I met over the years.
The little African girl was a particular favourite of mine and she was literally attached to my leg when I was moving around the take photos..in the end I just handed her my camera and let her go...she thought that was great.
A few years after I took the first pic of her with another girl at the blackboard, I met her family at another event at the Adelaide Zoo. She immediately recognised me and ran up to give me a hug.
I was able to get a shot of her with her family.