Sparrow frenzy at the back yard feeder... December 2010

Just to remind you (in case you think I've lost my mind which is entirely possible given the events of the last few days), when I put a date in the title of a post, it refers to the date the image was captured, not the date of the post. This image is from a sunny day in December of last year when the birds were going a little bit crazy for the food in my feeders. It is also the first image that I've posted where I did quite a bit of post-processing using many of the tricks I learned in my Lightroom class (more on this below).

As for the events of the past few days that have contributed to my absence (as far as visiting YOUR blogs), I took a Lightroom 3 class this past Saturday and have been struggling since then to master a few simple things that are FAR from intuitively obvious.

This is where the internet is a MARVELOUS tool... because one of the things I've been struggling with is publishing images to Picasa/Facebook/Flickr (and maybe others in future) straight out of Lightroom. Let me tell you about the Facebook fiasco... the Publishing Service for Facebook that comes WITH Lightroom 3 has sent my browser into never-never-land more times than I can count... in trying to troubleshoot the problem, I clicked the Plug-in Exchange button (not having a CLUE what it did) in the setup dialog for setting up the various Publishing Services in Lightroom. Voilà! That button took me to Adobe's Lightroom page where I could search for plug-ins for publishing to various web services. And I found a third party developer's plug-in for Picasa... the developer has already received a donation from me to support his efforts for Picasa. (and I suspect he will be receiving one for his Export to Facebook plug-in although I haven't set that service up yet because I wanted to send some images to Picasa first so I could blog this one today!)

And in case you are wondering... why Lightroom? I've used iPhoto on a Mac since first starting to use a digital camera almost five years ago. As much as I LOVE my Mac and the ease of use of iPhoto, I hate the way iPhoto 'hides' deep in the iPhoto library, images representing my originals AND another copy of the SAME image representing any editing changes thus increasing overhead as far as storing multiple copies of the same photo. And, IF I want to use Photoshop (either Elements or the full version of Photoshop) to further edit an image that I've put into iPhoto, I have to EITHER export it OR go find it (there are ways) where it is buried in the library and put a copy somewhere outside of the iPhoto library where Photoshop software can 'see' the image.

As you might expect, after awhile working with iPhoto gets awfully old and tiring and it is also limited as to the editing changes one can make if one starts to get REALLY serious about post-processing. So, I'm trying to learn Lightroom and hope to eventually stop using iPhoto altogether. The learning curve is quite steep!

Cardinal Collage... Mr. and Mrs. in snow... Winter 2011

I just cannot resist the cardinals... especially in winter when their colors stand out so beautifully in the gloom. Later in the week, I'll post some full size views of these beautiful birds but thought you might like to see them enjoying my newest squirrel proof feeder and posing on my snowy deck rail.

Excuse me... I was here first! Sparrows at my feeder... December, 2010

It's kind of sad that the sparrows have mostly driven away the other birds that used to visit my feeders... and this morning, this feeder was the only one with any seed left in it before I went out to refill all of them. There were at least 30 sparrows sitting in a neighbor's rose bush and taking turns at the feeder... some were more polite than others but mostly it was a feeding frenzy!

I know this isn't the best in terms of sharpness of the image... in addition to the motion of the feeder due to the sparrows fighting over perches, there was a fairly stiff breeze blowing things around.

I'll be mostly off-line for a few days but will visit soon. I'm enjoying comments and promise to return your visits soon if I haven't already!