Thursday Alibis and Happy Thanksgiving

© jmillerphoto.com - Northern Mockingbird

First and foremost, to my friends both in the States and in places near and far, in peace and in danger, to each of you I wish a safe, blessed, and happy Thanksgiving Day.

As to the alibis… I realized during my work to complete the keywording on my Pedernales Falls SP visit that I had another life list add.  Well, technically I had an add.  The bird added to the list is a Orange-crowned Warbler (Oreothlypis celata).  I say technically because I’ve seen one before.  I saw mine about three years ago at San Angelo SP’s bird blind and it took the help of a local birder who’s name I cannot recall and who’s website has gone far into disrepair.  But for whatever reason it was not on my life list that I keep on Google Docs.  With that addition my life list for birds has now grown to 122.  I am exceedingly thankful to be through that marathon keywording session and I can now go to picking the winners from the losers.

Also, for what it is worth, I did slip in a recharged battery into the 60D before the trip to Pedernales Falls SP.  There is a menu option that will show the number of frames exposed on that battery and it told me that I had made in excess of 2200 images. It also provides an estimate of how much juice is left and it said that I only had about 12% of the charge left.  In hindsight, swapping out the battery was an outstanding idea given that I would have run it out of power about half way through my shoot.

And, I got questioned in a private message regarding my unhappiness about CS6’s upcoming upgrade policy and the implication that I was just, um, complaining about what it was going to cost me to get current.  That tells me I was not clear enough in my original post.  I bought CS5 and LR3 about a year and a half ago.  I still think that both the new upgrade policy (which won’t hurt me at all at this point) and the “software as a service” model with a constant bill are both bad policies from Adobe.  I’ll talk about my problems with software as a service in a future blog post.

Again, Happy Thanksgiving!

About the image:

A Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) from my recent visit to Pedernales Falls SP.  The gray skies and a gray bird presented a challenge, but he came around quite a few times giving me more than one opportunity to get it wrong, er, finally get it right. 🙂