Kevin Merchant Photography News - 2020

Well, it has been quite a while since the last update. Needless to say, I never did manage to capture any bluebird fledglings. I would most likely need to be making daily visits in order to have the best opportunity. Maybe when it is safer for overnight stays.

In August I went on a day hike to Mt. Rainier for wildflowers. It is always a bit tricky to time a trip for the peak of the bloom. In this case, I would say I was a bit early. That is not to say there were no wildflowers, just not in the best locations for including the mountain. There were, however, several marmots that were out and active. In fact, we spent several minutes with a pair that were play fighting. Eventually, one of them tired of the game and wandered off to warm itself in the sun.

Earlier in the spring, I did some macro photography of lupine in bloom, ustilising a focusing rail to produce a series of shots that result in a single focus-stacked composite image. On one of my daily walks, I noticed a yellow flower blooming on a very tall stalk with no idea what it was. But, I also noticed a much smaller one that was still growing and had buds and one open bloom. I rescued this one, literally days before a city crew came along and mowed the grass including the tall flower. It turns out the flower is a hairy evening primrose. I patiently waited for the flower to bloom and in August made several series of shots for focus stacking. Like everything else, they wait for processing.

In October, I made a couple of caravanning trips (it's a new thing) with a friend for fall color. The first was a hike in the north Cascades to Heather Pass and Maple Pass. As it turns out, we did not go all the way to Maple Pass, since most of the color was down lower. The primary goal was to photograph the western larches turning a golden yellow; a deciduous conifer that loses its needles in the fall. The larches are generally found in the higher elevations of the Cascades. We had a spectacular day of hiking and shooting.

The second caravanning trip involved a drive over Stevens Pass, towards Leavenworth. Normally not a big deal, but the Cascades had received a dusting of snow which called for cautious driving early in the morning in the dark. Once over the pass, the scenes were stunning with the snow. We started the day, shooting at a pulloff along Nason Creek before you arrive at the community known as Coles Corner. We continued down into Tumwater Canyon, along the Wenatchee River. There is a footbridge that crosses the river giving a unique perspective looking upriver. The bridge does require appropriate footwear as it is constructed from an old steel pipe, cut lengthwise such that about the lower third forms the bridge. It has no drainage and captures quite a bit of water from rain and snow. Although there had been a number of makeshift efforts to avoid the water, you would have to be a master of the balance beam to not get wet. We, however, went prepared.

To finish off the trip, we drove on towards Leavenworth and drove up Icicle Creek Canyon. The broadleaf maples and creek did not disappoint. I believe this is one of the overlooked locations for fall color in the area. Well worth the drive.

The fall color at home seemed to be delayed this year, but the maples in the backyard were spectacular in November. I waited for just the right time to shoot a swath of leaves covering the yard. It was unusual to have so many leaves still in reds and oranges on the ground. Usually, the color fades too quickly.

That pretty much wraps up the field work that I did this year. My time at home has involved a significant number of hours on the image re-sizing project that has been going on now for a year and a half. September and October were no different. It should be noted, at this point in the story, that this work involves a significant amount of effort in Adobe Lightroom (I have version 6.14, abstaining from the Adobe subscription service). My time up until about two weeks ago is a different story. At the end of October, a Windows 10 update automatically launched, unbeknownst to me, and appeared to complete successfully. However, while working in Lightroom, my computer crashed - the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. It rebooted and all seemed fine. That is, until I started Lightroom up. I was informed that my catalog, the Lightroom database, was corrupted and needed repaired. This is never a good sign. The repair ended in a dialog box that told me it failed to repair the catalog and to use my last backup. Sure. This is all fine and good except my last backup had been a month and ten days prior. (Note to self: You must make more frequent backups!!!) Not realizing there was a bigger problem, I began the laborious work of recovering forty days of intense work in Lightroom. But, the computer kept crashing. This is not going well.

My first inclination was to think that something in the corrupted catalog was causing the problem. I tried narrowing it down to a smaller part of my catalog. It should be noted that I currently keep all of my digital images, going back to 2005, in a single catalog. Not everybody does this, but it makes life simpler when you need to find images. Narrowing down the portion of catalog data that I was trying to restore did not help.

Somewhere in the next two weeks, along with the trouble in Lightroom, I decided it was time to sync my iPhone to iTunes. It's the safe thing to do as this backs up the phone data. iTunes informs me there is an update to iOS. Sure, why not? What can go wrong? Midway through the update process, the computer crashes. I promise, I am not running Lightroom and have no idea why this happened. But, this event bricked my phone. It's dead, Jim. No amount of fiddling in iTunes yields a working phone. Now I am truly worried the computer is a goner.

Here is where the story gets really geeky so, I won't blame you if you check out. A fair amount of searching on the Internet for problems/incompatibilities that might be associated with Lightroom 6.14 and Windows 10 turned up nothing particularly actionable. I installed WinDbg, a Microsoft tool to look at crash dumps; a step not for the feint of heart, including me. Again, nothing jumped out at me. Reluctantly, I had reached a point of stepping back to the previous version of Windows 10. Again, not for the faint of heart. I captured data on the boot drive that I did not want to lose in case this did not work, took a deep breath and did it.

A reboot and I was back to the previous version. My first order of business was to see if I could recover my phone. Many times I had tried the restore option that iTunes offered up. This time I chose to take the phone back to a factory reset state. Again, holding my breath and several hours later, the phone was restored and the last backup brought my phone back to a working state mostly where it was before, less a whole bunch of e-mail I didn't need anyway. Who knew that you could go a whole two weeks without a smart phone?!?

Back to my Lightroom story. Before restoring to the previous version of Windows 10, I had managed to open the corrupt catalog (I did learn that Adobe uses a SQLite database as the basis for its catalogs - this will be important later) and extract the lost work done after the last backup. I had done processing in three different years so I exported each year as its own catalog (2008, 2009, 2010). Cleverly, at this point I moved these catalogs to my Microsoft Surface where I had Lightroom working with no crashes. It turns out that there was still some corrupt data inside some of these catalogs. How did I know this? Because when I attempted to do backups of these catalogs and Lightroom performed an integrity test before backing up, some of the catalogs failed and would not backup.

What to do? Still faced with losing forty days of work, I bit the bullet and opened the catalog of each year and exported each day as its own catalog - a total of 93 catalogs. As I was searching around for how to recover from a corrupt catalog, most solutions were to go back to the last backup. That is NOT helpful. There were definitely no magic pills to be found. But, I came across two instances of someone who had a deep knowledge of databases (deep meaning smarter than me) and was familiar with SQLite. They both mapped out a procedure for cutting out the offending portion of the database. Wait! What?!? Why would you do that? Well, because it worked for them!

This involved downloading the latest version of SQLite. I did that. This is where my deep knowledge of DOS comes in because SQLite is a command line tool that you run in a Windows DOS box. Basically, you convert a database (catalog) back into its native SQL commands. Next, you take the resulting SQL file and convert it back into a database (catalog) file; all without knowing a thing about SQL. In this process, I was able to determine that exactly three days of the 93, from the original three catalogs (2008, 2009, 2010) had corrupt data. The rest were fine. By doing this, I now had reliable catalogs that could be imported into my Septermber 20^th backup. What about the other three days? Not being a complete dummy, early in the disaster, I had squirreled away copies of the corrupt catalog and I was able to extract the other three days successfully from one of those files. I did not have to delete data from any of the SQL files, so that was a relief.

I now have a surgically recovered catalog (backed up!). I am ready to do the Windows 10 update that I originally suspected was somehow corrupted. At this point, I really don't know. But I must move forward. With the update installed, I tentatively launch Lightroom. All looks good. But... you knew this was coming, right? About two days later, having done work in Lightroom and then closing it, Windows would crash. At least the Lightroom catalog was safe. At this point I have become totally gun-shy about working in Lightroom.

Having had previous crash history experience with a video driver, I wondered if that could be it. So, off I went to the Nvidia site and downloaded that latest driver (last updated in 2018, which is not good). After installing the driver there was still no happiness.

I also have a SoundBlaster sound card installed so I went and downloaded the latest driver for it. Again, after the installation there was no happiness.

Even if I were to do a clean Windows 10 install, there was no guarantee that a problem would not persist, short of new hardware, i.e. a new computer and the Adobe subscription service for Photoshop and Lightroom. For now, I carefully limped on as I needed to get some work done before Christmas.

One of the Microsoft tools I used since the beginning of my troubles is in the Control Panel under Security and Maintenance, in the Maintenance section - View Reliability History. Yes, it's buried but it can be helpful as it shows events related to system reliability, with a time stamp. Here I saw something I had not seen in any of the previous crashes - Adobe QT32 Server 8.0. After doing a bit of sleuthing, I came across a discussion about how Apple QuickTime for Windows support had ended in 2016. Huh? I did not know this. Although I rarely used QuickTime anymore, it was still installed. After uninstalling it, my Windows 10 crashes have come to an end. While I am not yet fully ready to take a victory lap, this does seem to have been the culprit all along.

It turns out that Adobe was using an external video library (QuickTime for Windows in my case) to render videos inside Lightroom. It appears that with the most recent update of Windows 10, an incompatibility with QuickTime had occurred. And, if at any point Lightroom was opened and/or closed this incompatibility would rear its ugly head causing Windows to crash. That is why it was hard to understand the cause of the crashes. I would never have suspected QuickTime and certainly did not realize that Apple had abandoned the Windows version or that Adobe was using an external library owned and maintained by Apple.

Lesson number one is to do more frequent backups of the Lightroom catalog. Even though the drivers weren't the culprit, it is always a good idea to stay up to date. Also, I would say beware of software that becomes unsupported. In my case, Lightroom 6.14 is no longer supported by Adobe. Whether I like it or not, I will be forced to move on at some point. In the case of QuickTime for Windows, I was not aware it had been obsoleted.

I have now been able to get back to resizing images and am being very good about backing up my Lightroom catalog.

I do wish you all a Happy New Year. Be well. Be safe.

Another brief update on the mountain bluebird chicks - they have all fledged. Today, I moved on to a western bluebird nestbox where there are four very young chicks in the nest. The parents were not as active as I would have liked in bringing food. My guess is that the chicks are only days old and not yet voracious in appetite. It won't be long.

Still, a productive day on trip 10.

Be well, be safe.

A very brief update on the mountain bluebird chicks. On trip 9, I confirmed there are five chicks in the nest where I had previously counted five eggs. Parents and chicks are all doing well.

It was another successful trip of shooting before sunrise and done by 10 AM. Home in time for lunch.

Be well, be safe.

Time for an update of ... more of the same. Yes, we are still in the lockdown with certain easing of restrictions such as visiting recreation areas. I have now made eight day trips to eastern Washington and the bluebirds I have been visiting are raising their second brood of chicks for this year. By my count, the one nestbox I was at had four very cute babies (yes, I briefly peeked inside as do the Audubon folks who volunteer to build, install and maintain the boxes). Both the male and female routinely came in with various food offerings - spiders, caterpillars, grasshoppers, ants, etc. If only I were an entemologist, I would be much more adept at identifying their diet. Tomorrow I will return for another visit.

Last week we did an overnight trip over the North Cascades highway, in less than stellar conditions. Low clouds, rain and cool temperatures reminded us that this is what you can get in Washington in early July. Sometimes it is referred to as blue tarp camping. Low clouds muted what the stellar views above Diablo Lake and its turquoise hued water would otherwise have revealed.

One of the highlights of the trip was seeing a black bear crossing the road after we had passesd the East Shore Trail. We have seen them before on hiking trails here, obscured by trees and brush. But, this time we got a very long and clear view. Awesome!

Soon, we were stopping at a pull-off for a roadside waterfall that I just could not pass up. I'm sure the creek has a name, but it was not marked and I have not tracked it down. Not much further we passed a pull-off for Granite Creek. We circled back and I donned boots and overshoes to go into the creek for some shooting where the creek was flowing pretty good. I carefully picked a shallow spot to shoot from in what was surely snow-melt fed water.

Our view at Washington Pass? Why, the base of Liberty Bell, of course - one of the stunning granite spires which many years ago I climbed with a work mate. My memory of that trip is belaying my climbing partner in very cold temps at the shaded base, waiting to get higher into full sunshine. Overall, it was a stellar day of climbing, but that start...

Campgrounds are open and we spent a night in the Lake Chelan State Park, with as much self-contained camping as we could muster. We did avail ourselves of the campground restroom facilities, but otherwise kept to ourselves.

Our final side excursion was a drive up Icicle Creek Canyon. My only spring time visits there have been climbing related with no time to stop and view the creek. The water is flowing really good right now and is calling me back. We will see if I make that trip or not. Fingers crossed.

Every now and again, I stop to do a backup of my hard drives. Today is that day and I usually have a few minutes to reflect on what has been going on. My summer continues to be a busy one in spite of COVID-19. We have been doing neighborhood walks. So far this year, we have logged over 700 miles, rain or shine. Additionally, I have done some local hiking with a friend (masked up and keeping a distance, of course) which has helped keep some sanity in an otherwise unusual and unexpected time.

Until next time, be well, be safe.

Here it is, week whatever of the COVID-19 lockdown. I've lost count and does it really matter? Life must go on.

Yesterday marked my sixth trip to eastern Washington for bluebirds. On my previous trip, I found that the mountain bluebird chicks had already fledged and seemed to be gone. The nest box had been emptied out by someone and the adults were busily building another nest. That meant that there were lots of opportunities to capture both the male and female coming and going with nesting material. Note to self: I must start sooner next year, in April.

It is a two hour drive to get to the area and if I want to be there for first light, that means I am up at 2:30 in the morning and on the road before 3 AM. Which means that I do all of my trip preparation the night before. About all I have to do in the morning is re-heat some coffee for the road and load the truck.

Is it worth it? You bet. It is hard to describe the feeling as the sun slowly comes up over the eastern horizon and lights up the birds in front of me. But, I am there all alone to see the day start at 5-somehting in the morning.

On yesterday's trip, I found the female already incubating eggs for the next brood. The male hung outside the nest box for quite a bit of the time, preening himself. I had very brief opportunities with the female, emerging only to go find food.

All in all, though, a very good trip. I did not spend the whole day, so I was back home by lunchtime.

The backyard photo safaris continue to evolve. The sap in our mountain ash has quit running, so the red-breasted sapsuckers have ceased to show up. I knew the party would end, but a bit sooner than I had hoped. I have not seen the downy woodpeckers as frequently either. Their young may have fledged, but I really don't know.

As many visits as we are getting from the black-headed grosbeaks, I am guessing that they have nested nearby. In years past, they only made brief springtime visits and disappeared. Like everything else, this year is different.

Flowering Japanese iris and lupine that we have potted have provided some indoor studio shooting opportunities as well, especially when the weather outside is not cooperative. As there is no actual studio, I generally improvise on the kitchen table with items that allow me to do fairly quick setups. I am employing a focus stacking technique using a focusing rail, made by Really Right Stuff, that was acquired last year and has been severely under utilized since. I am also using some recently acquired LED lights from a comapany called Litra. They are not cheap but are very portable and very effective for my purposes.

I have also come into the posession of some domestically raised quail eggs. I have done some setups with material found on our daily nature walks around the neighborhood. And, I am using the focus stacking technique with them as well. Don't worry, the eggs have been consumed and the shells are waiting for my next photo setup idea using backlighting.

When might you see the results of some of these stories? That is a good question which I ask myself everyday. I am still working on my photo re-sizing project which has not made as much progress as I would like due to all of the new image acquisition activity. I am currently officially over a year behind in my processing of new images. It turns out that in the course of the re-sizing project, I have found a rather large number of images from years past that have been left untouched. How could this happen? I ask myself that, too. Life happens, days fill up with more pressing matters and you get distracted. That's my excuse and I'm sticking with it. The good news, for me anyway, is that I do have a number of new images that have appeared in the Gallery. More will follow as time allows.

Until next time, be well, be safe.

Week 11 of the COVID-19 lockdown here in Washington state. Phase 1 of loosening restrictions began two weeks ago which included opening state lands to limited hunting, fishing and recreation. I took this as my first opportunity to go out of town for some bird photograpy - eastern Washington for mountain bluebirds on a day trip. Other than the McDonald's drivethru for breakfast, porta-potty restroom break, self-serve gas fillup and a driveup Sonic burger, we spent the whole day in the truck with very limited human interaction. Not much different from my usual birding trips. Who knew that I had been practicing social avoidance all these years? It was a very successful day of shooting. With chicks in the nestbox, I'd like to return for when they fledge. Fingers crossed.

In prior weeks, I began what I termed my backyard photo safaris. I have had a pop-up hunting blind, that serves as a photo blind, for several years and really have not used it because the right circumstances have not been available to me. And really, with my tiny backyard, I did not think there was much opportunity for using it with our backyard visitors. But, with the afternoon light angle, strategically placed feeding staions and appropriate perches, I have made a number of successful outings. I usually spend at least 3 hours in the blind each time. And, my wife let's me keep all the junk in the living room rather than putting it away every time. So far, I have been on 12 successful safaris - days with good light and no rain.

My initial impetus to do this was the appearance of pine siskins and American goldfinches that come in every spring during the migration. They are here for several weeks and then move on. So I decided to strike while the opportunity was there. Of course, there are other spring time arrivals such as red-winged blackbirds and black-headed grosbeaks but they are really too large for the perch sizes I have chosen and also the distance of the blind to the perches and feeding station - the path for shooting with appropriate backgrounds does not permit any other perches. I did say the yard is tiny. So, less opportunities with them and they are much more wary.

We also have had a pair of downy woodpeckers coming in, primarily to the suet feeder. So, I found an appropriate sized dead tree branch that is setup vertically. I have drilled a couple of small holes and put suet in them - the woodpeckers have found the holes and regularly emypty out the suet. So far, only the male has made appearances while I am in the blind which is just great. Now, if only the female will come in.

One other species that is making regular appearances is a pair of red-breasted sapsuckers. They have a very striking appearance. For the first time last year, they came in and drilled sap wells in a mountain ash tree that is at the corner of the backyard. I had one shooting opportunity then. This year, they returned and began drilling new sap wells, many times while I was in the blind photographing the other birds. Because the drilling operation is up higher in the tree, I was not able to shoot from the blind. Well, it turns out, the birds don't get too upset with me there out in the open unless I get too close. Then, they get very vocal about it, fuss at me and fly off. Yesterday I spent 3 hours with the sapsuckers coming and going. I saw both male and female and I believe they must be feeding young as frequently as they were appearing. Today does not look like there will be good light, but I should have time for more opportunities.

No doubt we are all being affected in different ways by the lockdown and the virus. For us, all of our spring photo travel plans went out the window but I won't complain. I have been able to take advantage of what is right in front of me. I am blessed to have so many opportunities.

Be well. Be safe.

Here it is, Easter Sunday, and I do have something worth reporting on during week six of the COVID-19 lockdown. Several years ago, the Internet Service Provider of my web site was acquired by another company. No big deal, except the new company did an upgrade to server software that broke some features of my web site, including the Gallery software. The features that were broken were not visible to visitors, but there was one particular pain point for me in maintaining the gallery - I became limited to uploading only two images at a time. It became very tedious to upload new images in large batches, which is what I tend to do. The software that I was using was open source and the main developer had quit maintaining it about 3 years prior to that. There was no fixing the problem. In early January this year, I just happened to check the developer web site and discovered that another group of individuals had taken over maintaining the software. It turns out, I was not the only one who had the pain point of uploading new images because this was the main thing they fixed. That and bringing the code up to speed with the latest PHP server software, 7.0.

So, I bit the bullet and updated to the new version of software. Realize, of course, that I had not touched this software since I installed it in 2012. Did I remember all of the bits and pieces that I had customized? No! So it was a painful process customizing the new version to work like the existing version on my web site. But, I did get it done with a week or so of effort. And, I documented all of the files that I had to touch along the way. What I should have done the first time!!! Happily though, I now was able to upload as many images as I wanted. Hooray!!!

The real point of this News update though, is that I really was no longer satisfied with the current gallery software and I wondered if there was something better that was available in the open source community. I came across a package called Piwigo. One of the selling points was an endorsement from someone who was a previous user of the same software I was currently using. So, I did quite a bit of looking at various installations of Piwigo, looking at what it would take to install it and thought it could work for me. No harm to install it and see how it works.

It did take a while to figure things out as far as configuring it. It is very customizable with a large number of plugins. One of the downsides to using such software is that not all of it is very well documented, particularly the plugins. It was very much a "try it and see" process to understand which plugins were useful to me. The goal being to integrate it into the same look and feel of the web site, which it is not really designed for. As it started to take shape and mostly resemble what I wanted, I finally decided to dive into the code to finish making it look like the other pages on my web site. It has been about another two week effort.

The photos have not fully been populated due to the re-sizing project that I mentioned back in January. I have almost reached the halfway point of resizing images. The task slowed down quite a bit when I got to a batch of panoramic images that I ended up reprocessing. The panoramas are made from multiple images that are stitched together and then finished as I had done before. Once I get past those, I am hoping the pace will pick back up where I can finish the project this year.

Anyway, if you feel like kicking the tires on the new Gallery software, it has gone live.

Well, it is not hard to tell, by way of the 2019 NEWS archive, that I didn't do a lot of news reporting last year. A quick visit to the NEW section of the GALLERY will reveal that my last posting of images, made on November 25^th, is from a three week trip to Arizona in late March and early April.

The year started out with three snow storms totaling two feet of snow in two weeks time. Whenever the ground is snow covered long enough, we have a rare, but beautiful visitor to the feeding station - varied thrushes. I am always on the lookout when this happens; which is not very often. Eventually, I was rewarded and being prepared, got a few really nice shots of the birds coming in to feed.

In late March, with remnants of snow damaged trees still evident, we began on a three week trip to Arizona for wildflowers and birds. The scenic beauty of southeast Arizona did not disappoint. Although we were on the early side for cactus blooms, wildflowers were in bloom and we had an abundance of bird opportunities. It didn't hurt that we booked four nights on a private property with blinds to take advantage of opportunities to photograph some of the commonly found species such as cactus wrens, curve-billed thrashers, gila woodpeckers and gilded flickers.

Some of the places that we had opportunities to visit include Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Saguaro National Park, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Monument Valley Tribal Park, Ironwood Forest National Monument, Lost Dutchman State Park, Picacho Peak State Park and the Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch in Gilbert. I am still working my way through all of the images captured from this trip.

Next, I decided that a bluebird project was in order. There is a location on the east side of the Cascades with an abundance of western and mountain bluebirds; high desert sage habitat. I made a total of five separate trips with the first being an extended scouting trip and four more concise but productive trips. The images are still waiting for the necessary digital darkroom processing.

I managed one other wildflower day trip to Mt. Rainier in August. I was not disappointed as the lupine and western anemone were still in bloom, if only just past the peak.

Other parts of the year were taken up with various personal activities requiring a fair amount of my attention. If it feels that my outings are fewer than other years, I would agree, except for how productive the Arizona and bluebird trips were.

Besides the usual processing of images recently shot, there is one particular project that I have embarked on that is taking quite a bit of time. It is an effort to resize all of the images I have posted in the image GALLERY. At the start of 2017, I began posting larger sized images which coincided with the beginning of my Instagram account. I was told by a friend that my smaller, 500-pixels-on-the-long-side, images were too small. So, I landed on an appropriately larger size of 800 pixels on the long side as my new standard. Going forward, all new images were properly sized with a new watermark. The problem is, the daunting number of smaller images already posted. You will have to trust me when I say that reproducing nearly 4000 images to a new size with a new watermark is not as simple as pushing a button.

In fact, the project has become a bit of a journey. Some of the very first images that I had available for the web site were from 35mm film and going forward through the various digital cameras I have owned. For me, the path of getting 35mm slides digitized began with a now obsolete technology from Kodak called Photo CD (you would be hard pressed to find commercially available software that can read Kodak's proprietary PCD file format). You would submit your film to a processing center which is then scanned by a Kodak trained technician and burned on to a CD-R. At the time, this was the most economical way to get film scanned to high resolution image files. I had exactly 60 slides scanned for a Photo CD.

At some point I acquired my own film scanner, the Polaroid SprintScan 4000, capable of producing high resolution 4000 DPI scans. As it turns out, I was very selective about the slides that I scanned with this scanner; it was a time consuming effort as I discovered. In the pursuit of higher quality scans, I next acquired the Nikon SuperCoolScan 5000 ED. Shortly after buying this scanner, Nikon obsoleted it and not too much time later ceased to provide any software support. After upgrading to Windows 10, the Nikon software would no longer work. Last year, I invested in VueScan, software that is able to communicate with the scanner, enabling me to continue converting film to the digital domain.

For digital capture, my very first DSLR body was the Canon 20D; this body has what has become known as a cropped sensor, meaning you do not get the full equivalent of a 35mm piece of film. One limitation of cropped sensor bodies is that wide angle lenses are not wide angle. For wide angle, you would have to invest in an ultra wide angle lens. This fact led me to quickly replacing the 20D with the full frame Canon 5D DSLR body soon after it was released. A number of acquisitions have occurred since my first foray into the world of digital image acquisition.

As I mentioned, this project has become a journey. As has been the case before, going back in time to survey the whole of my image library has been very educational. At the very end of my film days (no, I wouldn't really want to go back to film like some folks are) I was anticipating the ability of HDR (high dynamic range) images with multiple exposures. I am also struck by how much the digital tools at my disposal have improved as well as my ability to use them. And, some of my processing choices were either heavy handed or not very well thought through. My editing skills were pretty primitive compared to my workflow today. This has led to a large number of these images being completely re-processed before resizing them. And this re-processing is why it is not being done by simply pushing a button (although, it would still not be that simple to do).

As it stands, I am just over one quarter of the way through the project. I have discovered images that have been left unprocessed for a long time. I have also discovered images that are of questionable quality to begin with (by me, at least) that will be removed from the finished library. Other than delaying all of the recently captured images from being processed, I am pleased with how the project is coming along.

With all of that said, I will repeat last year's wishes - Happy New Year to everyone. All of the usual traditions have been observed - cards and letters have been sent, calendars have been printed and handed out, egg nog has been consumed, Christmas decorations were put up and now put away and the tree has been deposited outside (temporarily) for the birds to use in their usual ways. Hopefully, a snowshoe trip won't be too far off in the future - it's been snowing pretty good in the mountains.

Continuing from 2019's theme, catching up continues.

Wishing everyone a happy and prosperous New Year.