It took some time and a learning curve, but I am now more or less happily using Adobe Lightroom 2.4 to manage my more serious DSLR nature photography. (I still use iPhoto for point-and-shoot family photos and the like.) Lightroom’s ability to correct exposure problems is nothing short of magic, and has rescued many photos. Here are some updates on things I’ve talked about in the past, as well as some open questions.
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I think it’s time to look for a new local bank. WAMU was marginally competent at best. Chase isn’t even that. I login to my account this morning and here’s what I see:
They say they want this for security, but I call bullshit on that. The real problem is that Chase’s system doesn’t allow the e-mail addresses that WAMU used for its usernames. Rather than upgrade their systems, they decided to inconvenience millions of customers.
And on top of that, the form doesn’t actually work. As I type this, it’s been “Transferring data from online.wamu.com….” for many minutes. And the final result?
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Beth and I caught Up this past weekend, and wow. Pixar has hit another one out of the park. Once again they’ve produced a brilliant, fun, original, creative movie unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. And it’s not just the animation (though that does open up possibilities that don’t exist in a live action movie). I’ve been racking my brain, and I really can’t think of a prior story–movie, novel, or comic book–that’s remotely close to Up’s. Where Disney persists in ripping off centuries old fairy tales, and most studios just keep remaking the same 5 or 6 stale plots over and over, Pixar somehow manages to continue creating wildly new tales out of whole cloth.
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| From Nix Nature Center, Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, 2009-05-24 |
Brokenbacked Bug (Taylorilygus apicalis) on California Bush Sunflower
But still the best shot I’ve managed with the new DSLR setup so I thought it was worth posting. Setting the aperture to f/8.0 and using a flash helps a lot.
The advantage to shooting honeybees is that they’re common, easy-to-find, and not especially nervous around people or cameras. In fact, in most locations they seem to easily outnumber all other bees combined. In the Americas and Australia, they are an introduced species that weren’t present at all until a few hundred years ago. Possibly they have displaced native bees and pollinators, though the evidence is unclear. (Alien Species in North America and Hawaii, George W. Cox, p. 48.) If they did, it likely happened several hundred years ago, before most folks noticed and now they just seem like a native part of the fauna. Possibly reduction of honeybee populations in non-agricultural areas might have a cascading effect on many non-native plant species that depend on honeybees for pollination.
