Caught Up… In Time To Be Behind Again
I have reached an odd time in my journey to get caught up on my processing. Yesterday morning, waiting for an online cribbage tournament to start, I achieved something I’ve never managed to accomplish. All of the images I have shot with a long-term camera have been evaluated and the keepers have been processed.
That camera is my Canon EOS 7D Mark II. It is the one that I still shoot today, though it is likely I will retire it as soon as at the end of this shooting season.
My last image to get my caught up was the Blue Dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis) that leads this blog post. It was frame number 331 on a day in late August 2015. That shooting day was the last day of shooting for that particular Lightroom catalog. Lightroom in the mid 2010s was persnickety about the size of catalogs and the bigger the catalog, the worse Lightroom behaved. Not so much of a problem these days, but then it was a problem.
I’m proud that images that have been buried in the portfolio for what seems like forever have finally gotten to see the light of day. I’m also proud that I’ve reached a little more than 68% processed of all of the shoots from 2011 until today. That marks a remarkable change from October when the number was only at about 35%. All the much more remarkable when you consider the time I lost from late November until into January while my body healed.
And I’m typing this while I’m looking at my camera bag. It is sitting close to the office door in anticipation of this week opening it up and making sure I have everything I need to start this season’s shooting. I’m looking at a trip back to Texas where I anticipate I’ll bring home a few thousand images. And once again I’ll be back at being behind.
But it’ll sure be fun getting there.
About the Image
Blue Dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis)
Bexar County, Texas – August 2015
Canon 7D Mark II, Canon 300mm f4 L w/1.4x teleconverter
Tripod
ISO 400, 1/640 at f/14 – No Flash
Portfolio Image #1596
Image Size in Portfolio: 4232×3386
I ended up processing about 5 Blue Dashers from this particular photo shoot. Not the most rare or unique dragonfly out there, but they still make a pretty image.
Odonata Lightroom Classic Keyword List
It has been a while since I’ve posted. Not a lot photographically happening for me yet this year, minus processing images and I don’t know that reading about me processing images is all that exciting.
I was made aware of a great resource about dragonflies and damselflies that I’d love to share with you. Sidney Dunkle, Jim Johnson, and Dennis Paulson have published a new checklist of North American Odonata for 2024. This is a great read for those who are interested in dragonflies and damselflies.
I’ve created a new Lightroom keyword list from that paper that I’ll be using from this point forward to better metatag my images. With Jim’s blessing, I am sharing that list here: Odonata_2024.txt. The image is hosted at my woefully out of date Pictures from Iceland website. Someday I’ll get back…
To bring it into Lightroom Classic:
- Right click or control click the link above, and Save as to save it to your hard drive
- In Lightroom in the Library module click on Metadata and select Import Keywords…
- Find the file and open it
The way I use it in Lightroom Classic is under Keyword Tags I use Keywords & Containing Keywords and I type the English name of the dragonfly or damselfly. With that it will now populate as keywords
- English name
- Scientific name
- Genus (to include the English name for that genus)
- And all the way up to Eukaryote
Feel free to modify as you would like. There is no copyright on the names of the Odonata. If you find it useful, let me know.
SQUIRREL!!!
I have joked that I suffer from AOADHDOLS. That’s Adult Onset, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disor-de-rrr, Oh Look! SQUIRREL!!!
A recent morning was an example of this.
I had just completed a blog post. I went back looking at my 2011-Now Shoots tab of my master spreadsheet since I had commented about the spreadsheet in the blog post and I noticed an issue. I had not annotated my notes field with whether or not a large swath of my pre-2014 photo shoots which had not been fully processed had been identified as flagged or not flagged. This makes a difference when I get to that particular shoot because if I have not flagged the images then odds are very good I haven’t done much of the other admin work I have to do before I can get to processing them. Things like identifying species.
Since it was still early on that weekend morning and I really didn’t have anything better to do, I allowed the slight squirrel moment to be productive in this particular task. Leaving it undone before did not affect other work. Nor did doing this work today necessarily affect any of today’s work. Just a good, “be productive” sort of cycles that would pay off eventually.
As I went through the catalogs, labeling “flagged”, “partially flagged”, and “not flagged”, I progressed to a October 2012 visit to Mitchell Lake Audubon Center in San Antonio, Texas. As I clicked the “Flagged” button to see if I’d done any work in this catalog, I saw the most beautiful image of a Roseate Skimmer that I had flagged, cropped, but done nothing else with. Beautifully lit. Creamy background. Awesome foreground detail.
SQUIRREL!!!
Yes, I know. Dragonfly. Not a squirrel. Got it.
But the impulse got me and I had to process the image.
It didn’t take very long. I went right back to finishing my flagged status notes through to the end of 2013 (and thus now the entire spreadsheet is completely annotated). But it is an example of the struggles I have had over time with staying on task and being systematic about getting these images processed. I see a shiny thing and I’m attracted to it. And I’ve now lost the path that I had been on previously.
And why hadn’t those 2011-2014 notes fields been filled in? Likely another Squirrel moment.
About the Image
Roseate Skimmer (Orthemis ferruginea)
Bexar County, Texas – October 2012
Canon 60D, Canon 300mm f4 L w/1.4x teleconverter
Tripod
ISO 400, 1/125 at f/14 – No Flash
Portfolio Image #1474
Image Size in Portfolio: 3586×2869
Progress and Planning
Forward progress on a number of fronts.
This year’s shooting planning is very much on track. On one side of my desk I have my trip planning folder for our annual Texas swing. Calendar, itinerary, reservation list, phone contacts, and receipt for my lens rental are all sitting in the folder. The one missing piece is our rental car reservations. Hope to maybe solidify that this week.
I went the lens rental route rather than the purchase the lens route because I’m still not sure what platform I will be shooting on after this year. I’m not sure I want to go the route of replacing my Tamron 150-600mm lens on Canon if I choose to go towards Nikon or Sony where the lens will be, at best, extraneous and at worst a $1,400 paperweight.
In addition to that one lengthy trip, I am also filling in the blanks for the smaller trips here and there. Most of those will not require the intricate plane, hotel, and car reservation planning that the long Texas trip always does, but there are little things here and there that do need to be addressed and accounted for.
Other progress has come from getting images processed. My spreadsheet reflects 35 images processed since the beginning of the year. A little short of my goal of 5 images a week, but not that much–on goal would be closer to 45 sitting at week 9 of the year.
After I finish writing this I will go back to work flagging and processing images of a photo shoot from mid-September 2021 at Cherry Creek State Park here in the Denver metro. If I can complete that shoot, and at only 160 images or so I don’t see why I can’t, I will have all processing done for my work from 2020 and I will have 6 of the last 7 years of images fully processed. Quite the change from my whining about how far behind I was in my processing in October. As of this morning, I sit at 194 of 349 photo shoots since 2011 fully processed, or a little more than 55%. That’s up from 35% when I mentally beat myself up pretty good about how far behind I was.
The challenge now will be keep up as best as I can with 2024 shooting while also trying to dive into the backlog. I am setting myself up for failure, though. From mid-April to mid-May I have 3 extended photo trips scheduled. Birds and things in Texas, street photography in one of my favorite towns, and a train weekend. Perhaps as many as 10 shooting days over the course of a month. And with little time at home between those days to process, the backlog is going to back up again.
About the Image
Band-winged Meadowhawk (Sympetrum semicinctum)
Arapahoe County, Colorado – September 2021
Canon 7D Mark II, Canon 300mm f4 L w/1.4x teleconverter
Tripod
ISO 400, 1/320 at f/14 – No Flash
Portfolio Image #1473
Image Size in Portfolio: 4560×3648 (effective full frame)
Last of the shots that I processed prior to writing this blog post and the first for the final shoot of 2021.
Memories of a Great Day
Mid-February is a pretty quiet time of year for me here in Colorado when it comes to photography. This is the time of year that I am processing images from year’s past and planning for the shooting to come. A far cry of the lengthy, nearly seasonless shooting season that I had in South Texas.
As I’ve mentioned before, I keep a spreadsheet of all of my shooting over the last nearly 13 years, going back to shortly after my arrival in San Antonio and my purchase of my Canon 60D. Along with being a great organizational too, I use that spreadsheet to help guide my travel planning when I am returning to places where I’ve shot before. I also have some selected shooting day notes to remind me about how conditions were, what I found, and so on.
Some shooting days don’t require notes.
Sticking out like the blue of Austin sticks out in the deep red sea that is Texas is a day in May 2017. I stumbled back upon this day looking for what I might see when we head to Texas this year.
It was a day away from the office I desperately needed. I had just been diagnosed with what was then the most significant health issue that I had dealt with in my post-military life and was still very much getting used to the new medication. Lots of stress with the meds, work, and home life. Not sure how it came about, but my friend Pliny had La Lomita opened that day and I was taking advantage of it.
In terms of raw numbers of images it wasn’t a spectacular day. Only just short of 3,100 images. Yes, it sounds like a huge number of images on the surface. Even with me shooting way too much at times, my normal day walking around is somewhere in the 300-500 range. But in a bird blind for the full day, that is a fairly average day for me.
But what came out of that day was photographic gold. Great light. Light wind. Favorable temperatures.
And 71 portfolio worthy images covering 15 different species. The 71 shots out of the 3100 images put it just short of a portfolio worthy shot every 44 shots. That is awful close to our goal in film of getting one keeper for every 36-exposure roll.
And bluntly, beyond the 71 there were probably another couple dozen that were wonderful shots that would have been portfolio worthy, but there was not enough difference between the shot I selected and the shot or shots that I did not.
It is great to be able to look back on days like that one and savor how awesome it was. It is one of the things that keeps me coming back to the trough, er, camera.
Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus)
Uvalde County, Texas – May 2017
Canon 7D Mark II, Tamron 150-600 (Gen 1) at 600mm
Tripod w/Wimberley gimbal head
ISO 400, 1/250 at f/11 – No Flash
Portfolio Image #0558
Image Size in Portfolio: 4172×3338
My second favorite Greater Roadrunner image in my portfolio.
And I’m back again…Mostly…
As I was starting to get back in the swing of writing blog posts, life happened again. A health concern popped up that I could not ignore and altered my day-to-day life significantly.
Health concern is about as much of a description as I’m going to proffer here. But it has involved lots of imagery. Lots of bloodwork. Couple of surgeries. And stuff.
It has been a struggle to truly get back into the swing of things. So much energy spent just trying to keep up with work (which in turn would keep my health insurance in place) that my creative side went into hibernation for a while.
These blog entries stopped. I stopped my daily posts over at Post, which is far less taxing than coming up with a few hundred words to write in a blog entry.
Along the way I also gave up a leadership role with the local chapter of a professional organization. Just no energy for extra draws on my time.
I think I’m back on the way back. The health concern is not gone, but it has been tamed. My creative self is starting to come back, but it is tough.
Along the way I have been productive, just not creative.
I have done a lot of trip planning for this year and years forward. Perhaps out of an abundance of hope that as the calendar pages fell off that my health would improve and I could get out. The hope of a new spring and new tomorrows. I’m getting there. Trip planning is logical and mechanical. It isn’t creative.
Efforts towards getting my life better organized–also easier. A file cabinet that looks a ton better today than it did in October. A replacement for my Raspberry Pi file server and moving into something a lot more stable and maintainable. Cataloging my shelf full of external hard drives. Maybe in an effort that things could be found if the health concern had taken a wicked detour. Again, logical and mechanical but not creative.
Being creative takes an amazing amount of a different kind of energy. I just haven’t had it.
You wouldn’t think something as simple as processing an image would take a ton of energy. But I found through these weeks it has been easier to build trip plans than it was to process images or write a blog entry.
I’m slowly getting back into processing images. I’ve processed a half dozen in this new year. A far cry from the dozen or more that I’d process with a cup of coffee just to the right of my mouse on a quiet Sunday morning. But even that was in a couple of spurts. It’ll come along.
I’m hoping to have more here sooner than later.
And it took eight days to write this.
The Death of a Lens
I’ve been relatively lucky over my time doing photography. For the most part my photographic equipment failures have been few and far between. And almost always my fault.
My original “serious” camera, my Olympus D-220L, had a technology breakdown of some sort well after I’d moved to film photography. I went to use it for my daughter’s birthday party and it kept corrupting the little memory cards that were common for that era.
I navigated through the Canon FD era of my photography with no undue harm. The AE-1 was just about bulletproof, and the FD lenses were as sturdy as they came.
I had a number of lens failures when I moved to the Canon EF system, but (paraphrasing a Teddy Roosevelt quote), if I kicked the backside of the person responsible for each of those failures, I wouldn’t have been able to sit for an extended period of time.
I ruined my original 28mm EF lens because my camera bag wasn’t big enough, I ran out of room and thought I could just protect it in another backpack. It was never was the same again. It sits today on Elan 7e which sits on a shelf with other film cameras.
I had a similar issue with my EF 50mm f1.8 lens. I went to mount it on my newly purchased Elan 7e—the last film camera that I ever regularly used. It too was not secured well in a camera bag. Thankfully it was a lens that was less than $100 and I already had the 50mm f2.5 macro lens that was sharper.
And I lost my original 75-300mm EF lens when I was changing lenses on New Year’s Eve 1998. I replaced it with a used lens from B&H and eventually gave it away when I gave away that camera and replaced the lens with a 70-300mm IS lens that I use to this day.
But really, it had been over 20 years since I had a piece of equipment fail. Until my most recent trip out to Kansas.
I pulled my Tamron 150-600mm (1st Generation) lens out of the bag to see if I could successfully use the lens to shoot out the side of the car. Ironically my first photo subject was going to be a set of vultures. I pressed halfway down to activate the autofocus and there was nothing.
I had just shot with that lens a few weeks prior in my backyard as a test run for a future project that I will blog about eventually, but not today. I fussed with all of the switches that could control it, but it refused to autofocus. I also noticed that the lock switch on the lens, which should have only activated at 150mm was locking wherever I wanted.
I don’t know what happened. Maybe an inadvertent juggle somewhere along the line finally caught up with me. Maybe some bouncing around inside the travel carry-on. But autofocus was toast. Manual focus, however, is still functional. But as I discussed in a previous blog entry, my eyes are not good enough anymore to not have autofocus.
In a sign that I am maturing, I did not bruise the King’s English when I realized it had stopped working. I did not drop a series of Sponge Bob sentence enhancers. I was frustrated. Heck, I’m still frustrated. But the trip had been such a good one to that point that I wasn’t going to let the annoyance of the lens not functioning keep me from enjoying the rest of the day. And I didn’t–over the course of the rest of the day I made at least 4 images that were portfolio worthy.
Losing the lens, though, opens up a deeper question. If I need to replace this lens, do I spend the money (about $1,400 USD) to replace it with the current model of the same lens from the same manufacturer (though granted an upgrade version from the one I own) and the same camera system (Canon’s EF series mirror-based dSLRs), or is this the time to bite the bullet and move to mirrorless and start with a body and a really big lens and use my 7D Mark II with the other lenses I own. This is complicated by the fact that previously I used the lens for about 3 days per year, though it is hoped that I’ll use it more in the coming year with that new project I’m taking on.
I can’t answer the path towards a new solution right now. And that is frustrating.
About the Image
Say’s Phoebe (Sayornis saya)
Elbert County, Colorado – April 2023
Canon 7D Mark II, Tamron 150-600 (Gen 1) at 600mm
Tripod w/Wimberley gimbal head
ISO 400, 1/250 at f/11 – No Flash
Portfolio Image #1281
Image Size in Portfolio: 4397×3518
Perhaps the last shot made with the Tamron 150-600 (Gen 1) lens that was worthy for processing prior to the autofocus failing.
Back in Train-ing
My shooting companion and I really enjoy trains. We like to travel by them when we can. We like to be around them. And we like to photograph them. Especially steam locomotives.
One of our first dates was at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden, Colorado, where they have a small stable of operational steam locomotives. The first summer that we lived together we went out to eastern Colorado to take images of Big Boy 4014, an operational Union Pacific steam locomotive that was at that point on its way back to its home in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Amazing monster of a train.
We like trains.
So when I stumbled upon the fact that there was going to be a photo charter for a steam locomotive relatively near our home outside of Denver, I didn’t think twice about buying the tickets and making the reservations.
A quick note on photo charters… In the train world, a photo charter is when a railroad will offer an opportunity for photographers to get on a train, be transported a few miles, told to get off the train, and then everybody lines up to take pictures of the train—both as it travels by and often in static poses. Places that would be difficult to get to if not for actually riding the train in the first place. They are not inexpensive. They are on par with shooting at a photography blind in South Texas for the day. But they are so worth it.
In our case, the photo charter was being held at the Abilene & Smoky Valley Railroad in Abilene, Kansas. Their steam locomotive, AT&SF 3415 is a 1919 vintage 4-6-2 Pacific, was supposed to be down this summer for a Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) 15-year inspection and maintenance period. But FRA informed the railroad before the start of the year that it still had a year left to run and A&SVRR took full advantage of having the locomotive run.
A&SVRR had never done a photo charter before. This one was also special because the bulk of the proceeds from the day went to helping pay for that 15-year inspection. In all, the photographers on the trip raised $10K to help pay for the needed maintenance to get the locomotive back on the tracks and through its inspection.
Amazing day of shooting all things considered. Weather could have been better, but it wasn’t horrible. We stayed with the train for almost 12 hours before calling it a day. Most of the rest of the photographers stayed well into the night. My over 1600 images for the day was good enough for me. Of those 1600 images, I managed to drop about a dozen images in the portfolio. I was happy as heck with the opportunity.
We made it a five-ish day trip. We headed out after work Wednesday night, staying in Goodland, Kansas. The following day we took our time, dodging rain as we went, and stayed the night in Salina, Kansas. Friday was the day of the photo charter and we went back to Salina to stay Friday night. On Saturday morning we traveled to Quivira NWR, one of my favorite places to shoot in Kansas, before wandering back up to Goodland, Kansas. And then Sunday it was the three-hour trip home.
Great trip and a place we’d like to come back to again.
About the Image
AT&SF 3415 Steam Locomotive on a Trestle
Dickinson County, Kansas – September 2023
Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF 17-40 L
Handheld
ISO 400, 1/200 at f/5.6 – No Flash
Portfolio Image #1353A
Image Size in Portfolio: 3767×3014
I processed this image for both color and monochrome (with the A version being the monochrome) because I like the feel it gives. The color image is pretty darn special, too.
You can help fund the refurbishment of this steam locomotive.
UFOs in Roswell That Were Insects
The Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge’s Dragonfly Festival has been on my “want to do” list for quite a while.
Bitter Lake NWR is near Roswell, New Mexico. Legendary home of a landing spot of some other flying objects.
I coveted it in what seems like a previous life when I lived in San Antonio. But one thing or another always kept us from trying to make that trip.
When I moved to Colorado Springs I contemplated it again. But my first year in the Springs the festival unfortunately lined up with my riding in Tour de Cure and Tour de Cure was a higher priority in my life. My second year in the Springs was the Covid year and the festival was cancelled. And then last year getting ready for a wedding and having just moved into a new home, there just wasn’t a chance I’d try to fit it into what was already a crazy schedule.
But as I was doing my planning this year, I made it a point that it was one of things I wanted to do with our limited resources.
In March we made our plans, got our hotel rooms, and got our plane reservations. We had things planned out so far in advance that I couldn’t find my rental car reservation confirmation when I got to the Avis counter in Lubbock, Texas. Thankfully they had it and it was all good.
And speaking of all good… the festival was all good. Winds cooperated on Saturday morning and I made some wonderful shots. As we went on the guided tour, I ran into a gentleman who was going to be one of the tour guides. As we talked, I realized I knew him. He was a gentleman from Lubbock that I had known since before I retired from the Air Force, but we’d never had the opportunity to meet in person. Crazy small world.
Lots of good odonates on that trip. Desert Whitetail, Aztec Dancer, Arroyo Bluet, and a Marl Pennant were all life list adds and new portfolio species for me. I missed, unfortunately, the Bleached Skimmer that was out there. It also, all things considered, was not a good year for the odonata. Eastern New Mexico has been very dry this year and many of the ponds that would be full this time of year were bone dry.
I expect we’ll be out again. It was a lot of fun.
About the Image
Marl Pennant (Macrodiplax blateata)
Chaves County, New Mexico – September 2023
Canon 7D Mark II, Canon 300mm f4 L w/1.4x teleconverter
Tripod
ISO 400, 1/400 at f/16 – No Flash
Portfolio Image #1143
Image Size in Portfolio: 4580×3648
Shot late in the day, with a heavy dose of fatigue and a light dose of dehydration. Fun bug to work with and an amazing background.
Processing Progress
A piece at a time I continue to make progress towards reducing my backlog of processing.
As I write this in late October, I have achieved something I rarely do within a single calendar year, or at least past Labor Day. I am completely caught up with my current year processing. All 29 of this year’s photo shoots have been harvested to a point that I feel comfortable that I have the best of the best.
That doesn’t mean that at some point I won’t go back and do a second harvest. I have a couple of dozen images in my archives where I’ve gone back to particularly fruitful days of shooting and managed to scare up a couple of more to process and drop into the portfolio. Those second harvests are the reason I never delete an image, no matter how horrible I think the image is. One just doesn’t know.
That also puts me a hair under 48% of having fully harvested all of my photo shoots going back to 2011. A significant change from an earlier blog post where I was bemoaning the fact I was closer to 35% harvested.
How did I get there? Bluntly, I made deliberate decisions not to go out shooting on three or four days that would have been perfect for it. A birthday party for a grandchild. A travel day for to help make somebody’s 21st birthday special on a trip that I left my serious gear at home. And at least one day where bluntly I just didn’t feel very good and rather than get myself sick (or sicker as the case was), I chilled at the house and processed images.
Those days added up to photo shoots I didn’t have and at least one day that I knocked down the backlog because I wasn’t in the field.
With winter weather approaching and diminishing chances to do the kind of shooting I like to do, I may be able to say that the book is closed on 2023. But I’ve already started to plan 2024. Glad you’ve stuck around.
About the Image:
Spotted Spreadwing (Lestes congener)
Lincoln County, Colorado – September 2023
Canon 7D Mark II, Canon 300mm f4 L w/1.4x teleconverter
Tripod
ISO 400, 1/400 at f/9 – No Flash
Portfolio Image #1432
Image Size in Portfolio: 3705×2904
I normally wouldn’t shoot this wide of an f-stop when doing damselflies of any size, and especially not a spreadwing which creates depth of field challenges. But the wind was blowing at 15-20mph and the threshold between still and bouncing was too narrow to go with a smaller f-stop that would have gotten more in focus. For what it is worth, this likely is the last (chronologically) image I will process from 2023 as I have no other trips planned. Shot #109 of Photo Shoot #29.
Jim's Assorted, Usually Photographic, Ramblings 