This is a quick note for those of you following this site via RSS: this is the final message that will show up on this site and in the RSS feed. If you want to see new content when it appears, you should subscribe to the feed at: http://chuq.me/blog?format=rss.

Thanks, and see you on the other side.

chuq

I wanted to do a quick status update on the migration/re-organization of things as I move myself and my content from here (chuqui.com) to my new home (https://www.chuq.me):

• I’ve got the new design pretty well in place, and I’ve rebuilt or migrated all of the landing, topic and support pages with one exception. Any time I moved something over, I deleted it here and added a redirect, so if you clicked on something and ended up over there, that’s why.
• I’ve got all of the blog that’s going to be moved from years 2018 and prior moved. I ended up editing out (aka throwing away) about 40% of the posts as not being worth the electrons to store them any longer. Those of you who believe that content should never be deleted or links should never 404, well, sorry. I’m not in that camp.
• The blog posts I’ve moved have been, mostly, the stuff that my site analytics show nobody ever looks at, and the stuff deleted definitely so. And most of it deserves that popularity. These blogs have been moved over in a semi-automated way, with limited editing to make clean them up, because honestly, that’s about all they deserve. I do have thoughts about things to do to use/repurpose them someday, but I’m not losing sleep if they aren’t as pretty as they were. There’s no real value is spending a lot of time working on content that almost nobody will see unless I start heavily promoting it.
• Starting in 2019 two things happen: first, I stop cringing at reading most of my writing, and I switched from writing in native WordPress (or Markdown) format into using the Divi editor (from Elegant Themes), which gave me a lot more flexibility and capability to make things visually nice, but — as my testing has proved — has broken the export/import tools completely. So all blog posting migration from here on in is 1 by 1 fully manual.
• I’ve removed my images from my Smugmug site in favor of the rethought portfolios and galleries on the new site. The old site is still around with a single image and a redirect message until sometime around October 1.

My current estimate is I’ve deleted about 30% of the words on the site, moved about 60% of the words that will ultimately be moved, and I have about 60% of the work left to move the other 40% or so. I feel like I’m about on schedule with my original estimates, which both makes me happy (because I estimated well) and scares me (because I’m wondering what I’ve missed).

After today, any new content I create, or the rewrites of the existing content that will get updated as I move it over, will show up on the new site, so if you aren’t currently monitoring the site https://www.chuq.me, or the blog https://www.chuq.me/blog now is a good time to start. If you’re one of the few people who still watch sites like this via RSS, the new feed to subscribe to is http://chuq.me/blog?format=rss.

I’ve been really heads down on migration recently so not a lot of new stuff; well, technically, lots of new interpretations of old stuff, which is new. But I’m at a point now where I can put some energy into writing as well as migrating, so hopefully, I’ll start having new things available Really Soon Now.

It’s been an interesting process and I think the end result is definitely worth it. It’s not the kind of project to take on lightly, but I’m at a different enough point that making myself rethink everything has given me both what I think is a better and more relevant site for today-me and tomorrow-me, but lots of interesting new ideas to ponder doing moving forward.

 

I’ve recently published the latest issue of my newsletter 6FPS. Please take a look at Humanity is Doomed (and more). Not subscribed yet? Here’s what you missed:

• I tried to limit the political and pandemic talk. Not always successfully
• You can find some details on my new and now ongoing blog re-architecture project
• We lost Bill Shannon, a major cornerstone of Sun Microsystems that you may well have never heard of, because he wanted it that way. But he deserved to be much better known.
• In this issue’s For Your Consideration, who knew that the band Rage Against the Machine was political?
• There is a special surprise just for subscribers, which you’ll have to guess at if you aren’t one.

You can always read back issues of the newsletter in the archives, but I won’t be posting notices about them regularly once the newsletter is more established. Subscribing is free and easy, so I want to suggest you please subscribe so you don’t miss out.

So subscribe already!

I’m probably crazy (like that’s a new concept), but I’ve started a big web project — I’ve begun completely reinventing my online web sites. This is a project I mentioned as something I was considering doing back around Christmas, and then put aside as more work than it was worth. About a month ago, I had an idea of what I wanted to do and liked it, so I started planning, and about two weeks ago I started digging in.

The first two pieces of this are now alive:

• Silicon Valley Birding: I’ve revamped the look and updated the content a bit to my birding site for Santa Clara County. I’ve also moved it from WordPress to Squarespace — we’ll talk about why shortly.
• Historic Hockey Archives: This is a new site. I was involved with online fan communities for a long time as an organizer and as a writer, and I did a lot of writing about hockey, but decided to retire and just watch it without stressing out about the need to talk about it in 2018. Fifteen years of blogging about hockey is a lot of content and I didn’t want it to go away in this project, but I also didn’t want to have to manage moving it into the new site. I decided what made sense was to create a site for the content in WordPress and host it there as a read-only Archive of those many days of watching and writing about hockey.

So, why am I doing this?

Many reasons (of course):

I’ve come to realize that what I want out of my online presence has changed a lot in the last few years, as I’ve found myself transitioning into a different mindset of who I am and what I want to accomplish. Part of that is the realization that since I’m about to turn 62, I should put some thought and work into setting things up for — well, later. And before you ask, no, there’s nothing going on in that front, other than a world pandemic where I find myself listed in multiple categories of higher risk, and a bunch of idiots running around thinking they can bully the virus into submission or ignore it because trying to stay healthy is too damned inconvenient. I’m continuing to do what I can to protect myself and Laurie, but there are enough things out of my control it’s had me thinking a bit about all the legacy and estate things I’ve been putting off doing since mom died.

In terms of my web site(s) online, I came to realize I needed to reinvent them, not just skin a new look and feel on top. So rather than just changing the color schemes and margins, this project is about creating a new online presence out of the old one, migrating pieces over and rethinking what and how I do all of this.

On a technical basis, a reason I’m doing this is that my current WordPress setup is not sustainable for me. I’ve long used Elegant Themes as my WordPress Theme vendor, and the quality of their code and design is quite good, but as I’ve dug more and more into using their Divi editor, I’ve found I want to work on my content in different ways, and so once I started thinking about this rework, I realized I needed to tear out the theme completely, which meant starting from scratch and a lot of rework of any article I wrote that used the Divi editor instead of the standard WordPress system, which means everything I’ve posted since May, 2019. There is no easy/automated migration path to a non-Divi based theme (that I would trust).

Once I realized this was a major “lots of hand work, piece by piece” project, moving it to Squarespace made a lot of sense. I love WordPress, but Squarespace will be lower maintenance since they’ll take care or more of the back end bits that I currently have to worry about, and it adds some nice features (like e-commerce) that I may or may not use, without my having to build them out and keep them running. In working out the budgets of this move, it also should save me a bit of money over my current hosting, once I finish a bunch of other behind the scenes cleanup that goes along with this.

So, the update to Silicon Valley Birding was my test case to see if I like Squarespace (I do), and the Hockey archive was a nice and simple way to take about 1/4 of the blog postings and set them up in a way that means I don’t have to move them in this project.

Really observant people might notice that the hockey site is a subdomain of chuq.me, which you haven’t seen me use before. It’s brand new, and I intend to build out the new site as chuq.me (not linked, but I will let folks know once I have the first bits up and running), and then once the work is done, close down the current site and redirect the chuqui.com to it, so both will work, but chuq.me will be the primary domain for my site moving forward once this project is complete. I figure if I I’m going to reinvent all of this, I might as well celebrate it with a new domain as well. And doing it that way makes this project massively easier.

I’ve also decided this is a good time for my to retire my long-time Smugmug site in favor of moving my portfolio galleries onto the Squarespace site. I have zero complaints about Smugmug, I like their system and how they run it, but this will save me some money and simplify my life and reduce somewhat the time I need to spend managing all of this, hopefully giving me a bit more time to create content ON the sites that now goes to keeping the sites running well.

I’m estimating this project will take 2-3 months. Along the way, bits and pieces on this site will disappear and re-appear on the new site. Most of the links are going to break; I realize that annoys some folks, but in practice it won’t matter except for the most popular pages on the old site, and those I will identify and add redirects for. I’ll also note that not all of the content will migrate, I’m already editing the existing site (moving backwards from the oldest bits I’ve already cleaned up into 2015). I’ve moved a quarter of the postings to the hockey site, and I’m estimating another quarter of the postings will simply go away — and many of them already have. Does anyone really care what I thought about the Fuji X-T2 four years ago? Looking at my Google Analytics, the answer is a clear “no”…

Digging into the Past

This project caused me to do a bit of digging into my past. The oldest references to me online that I’ve found go back to 1984 in the SF-Lovers archives but I believe my earliest online activities date back to around 1982 or so. In terms of this web site, it’s origin was on our domain plaidworks.com (which we gave up years ago and is now hosting some generic parked content). The earliest version of it on in the Archive.org archives is from December of 1996, because prior to that, Archive.org didn’t exist… I did blogging on the plaidworks site starting around 2001, maybe before, but split out the blog itself in 2005 onto — I had literally forgotten I had done this — December of 1998, but it was parked on an under construction page for a long time (for instance: October 1999). It finally launched in January of 2001.

So chuqui.com has been around almost 20 years and has served me well. I’m hoping that chuq.me will serve me well for the next 20, and that I’m around to keep posting to it and updating it every few years to a modern look.

I am going to ask that just note up front that if you go looking at some of these older site designs, please don’t point and laugh too loudly. They are ludicrously bad by today’s standards, but, well, that’s just how much the online universe has changed over the years. Don’t hold them against me too much…

So, that’s what’s happening. it’s a big, complicated, grinding project. It’s going to take a while, but I think it’ll be fun to figure it out and make it happen. I’m happy I set this up so I could move it in pieces and have both active during it, because that takes a lot of the time pressure off, removing most of the stress a project like this can have.

I do believe the work will be worth it for me. I hope you find the end result worth it as well.

Chuq

I’ve been meaning to talk about my office ever since I moved into it around two years ago, but as often happens, every time I think about it I’ve decided to do some tweaking. Most recently was the change from using an iMac and a Laptop to buying the Macbook Pro 16″ and getting rid of the other computers, so I’m now back to my preferred configuration: a good moderately powerful laptop docked to a monitor at home, but able to carry my files with me on the road without worrying about syncing data between machines. While I had the syncing problems mostly solved (Adobe Lightroom being the primary exception), living on one machine reduces the work needed to keep what I have in good working condition…

I think I have the setup settled for a while, so now’s a good time to go through how I set up the office and why it’s set up this way.

The home office is a converted bedroom, the smallest room in the house. That said, it’s a nice size, at about 14 feet by 8 feet, with a closet area attached. When I moved in I put in new carpet (a deep blue) and paint (a powder blue), with blue being a favorite and calming color for me.

Near the door is my computer desk, a Jarvis sit/stand motorized desk with a black top. My knees don’t let me do much standing while I work but I still use it at times, and I love the ability to raise it to work on things under it, because the knees can make getting under things and getting back up a bit of a challenge.

Since I’m a remote worker, this is where I am during the working day, so making it usable and comfortable. The Jarvis desk is only for the computer work, I haven’t tried to make it multi-purpose, but when I switched away from the iMac I put the laptop and monitor on raised mounts to make more of the desk surface available. The mounting ideas came from a video by DLSR Video Shooter, and use mounting systems from VIVO. There are two mounting systems here, a fixed one that holds the laptop on one arm and my video lights on another, and a pneumatic arm for the monitor.

The monitor is the BenQ SW2700PT (about $600), which comes with a glare screen and a matte screen finish, and it’s one that professional photographers tend to use because the matte finish reduces glare so you get a more reliable view of the image, and it includes hardware color calibration and a much wider color gamut than most monitors, leading to better color representation. I found the shift from other screens with glossy finishes to the matte one was more noticeable than I expected but I quickly got used to it and really like it.

Since I’m a remote worker that works at home, I spend a few hours a day in video conferences. Since I’m me, audio and video quality matter, and so my setup has been put together to make sure I have good video with quality audio. I could literally run a youtube channel off of this setup, which, some of you may remember, I came close to launching before coming to my senses, but it works quite well for web conferencing as well work I do at times doing screencasting and voiceovers and even the occasional podcast, although that’s fairly rare these days. And I keep thinking about doing occasional videos on photography still….

The camera I use is the venerable Logitech C920, attached to a boom arm. Clamped to that arm is my microphone, a Movo VXR10 designed for use on a DLSR for video. It is effectively a knock off of the Rode Video Micro, but I find it has a little more gain. It lets me use the microphone at a bit more distance than my previous microphone (the Shure Beta 58a) with good quality, and it costs a lot, lot less. I don’t have to worry as much about mic placement with this and I’m happy with the the results. Both are placed lower than the traditional “on top of the monitor/laptop” position, which I think looks better and allows people to see my face and not my bald spot. Behind and above it is a video light, the a 1 x 2 foot flexible LED panel by Neewer, which turns out to be way more than I need, so I have about 2/3s of it flagged — and even on the lowest setting that still a bit too much light. It’s remote controlled, but not switchable by homekit, unfortunately.

The laptop connects into a Caldigit TS3 plus, which manages all of the things hooked up to the computer and generates enough power (87 watts) to keep the 16″ laptop fully charged, even when doing extended CPU/GPU maxing processes like video transcoding. that means I have one single cable to plug and unplug from the laptop, which I like and is really convenient.

Because there are never enough USB ports, I use (and love) the Anker 10 port hubs, which can power up to 60 watts of charging power.

For audio, I currently use the Bose Companion 2 speakers. They sound good, and one thing I really like is that I can connect both my laptop audio and the audio from the monitor I use on the Apple TV, and it will auto-switch between the two sources. Not needing multiple sets of speakers turned out to be a feature I appreciate more than I expected.

On the box of drawers behind the laptop there’s an Akitio Thunder 3 RAID station with two 8TB drives configured as a mirrored raid. This is a thunderbolt 3 system so it gives me maximum speed, hardware RAID (it can also be configured for individual drives, JBOD or striped drive uses) and has a bunch of ports on the back including a second thunderbolt 3 for chaining, a displayport, a gigabit ethernet and two USB 3 ports. This would allow you to use it as a Thunderbolt dock for a lot of uses which might make the need of a separate dock like the CalDigit unnecessary. The downside is it has a fan, which is pretty quiet but I know that’s a problem for many. It can be turned off by a switch on the back, but you run the risk of it overheating so they recommend doing that only for short periods of time.

Attached to that drive are two 1TB Samsung T5 SSD drives. I like this because they’re cheap (1TB down to around $150) and bus powered, so they don’t need power bricks to operate. One of these is my time machine backup drive for the laptop, and the other I use to clone the data partition (via SuperDuper) off the Akitio so that if that drive fails I have a usable backup. Am I a bit paranoid about backups and redundant copies? Yes, yes I am.

Also back there is my Nintendo Switch in a dock, and my Apple TV. They both connect to an LG 27″ 4K monitor via an Univivi HDMI switch. The LG is a really nice monitor, and is one of the few true 4K monitors available at < 40" in size, and given where I needed it mounted on my wall, was the only 4K monitor that would work for my needs. Under the BenQ monitor is a black mesh monitor stand, which exists only for the drawers so I can organize stuff on the desk. I have, in fact, removed the bottom drawer and I use that space to hide the various power bricks from view.

To the right of the desk is another box of drawers, and on top of that is an HP Officejet Pro 8720 printer, which I bought because Wirecutter suggested it, and it’s been fine and forgettable, which is about all I can ask of an office printer these days. Also attached is a Brother label printer, mostly because my handwriting sucks and I know that.

I will discuss the software I use in another post, coming soonish.

Office Furniture

When I designed the office, I wanted a workspace dedicated to the computer, based around the Jarvis desk and which I’ve described above. I also wanted a project space, and I knew I needed desk space for the stuff that has to live on a desk, so I created a galley-style seating area with the Jarvis against a wall, and an L-shaped desk opposite it, with the main desk area I try to keep clear for project work, and the other part of the L intended for holding all of the stuff that has to live on a desk. I ended up picking up a Zinus Dominic desk off Amazon. It’s fairly small, inexpensive (about $140) and solid and stable. It’s worked great for what I need.

I”m also a bit of a clutter-phobe, so I wanted lots of drawers to stick things in. Winsome makes the Halifax line, which are plain black boxes of drawers in various sizes. I have two seven drawer boxes and two five drawer boxes. The five drawers fit fine under my Zinus desk, but that gives me 24 drawers to file away and organize stuff and keep the clutter mostly at bay. At about $100 per set of drawers, these have been a nice addition, plus they add a few spots of table space to the office; one holds the HP printer, another holds my Epson photo printer, one is the one with the disk drive and switch on it acting as the “keep this stuff off the computer desk” place, and the fourth is hiding under the Zinus desk.

On the opposite wall from the computer desk behind the Zinus are my bookcases. I use these for — gasp — books, and also for exposed storage of things like my camera gear, so it’s available when I want it without it hiding away in a bag. I also have an “IT” shelf, which holds my Mac Mini (used primarily for Plex), the Eero wifi router for this part of the house, and a gigabit ethernet switch to connect to various things in the room. While the Eero WIFI has been fine, since they were bought by Amazon I’ve worried about data privacy (note: Amazon has done nothing to earn this worry. Yet), so one of my plans for 2020 is to replace the house Wifi with a new setup, once I decide on a replacement. I’m looking to see who comes out with a good Wifi-6 capable mesh system that is not Amazon/Google/Facebook. If only Apple had one…..

Also behind the Zinus desk is a second chair for visitors and cats. Mostly, these days, cats.

The closet has been repurposed to storage, again in a mostly successful attempt to manage clutter. I built it out using the AmazonBasic wire mesh storage cubes, and the space was just about perfect for a 4×3 grid of these, which only ran about $75. It turns out that two of the Sterilite 15 quart storage boxes fit great in one of those cubes, so one row is filled with a set of those holding various things. Those are great boxes for long-term storage, with solid latches and translucent plastic so you can see what’s in them, and they are large enough to hold a reasonable amount of stuff without being so large they waste a lot of empty space. I use them extensively here in the office as well as in the garage to hold on to things and keep them protected and out of the way.

The office has been completely turned over to homekit to drive the lighting, which is awesome, except when it randomly breaks, which fortunately, isn’t too often these days. Most of the lighting in the room (and actually, in much of the house) is Tiffany-style stained glass, which I love. Almost all of it I bought via Amazon over time, and you can see all of the diverse options by searching for Tiffany Lighting. Without making specific recommendations (find the designs you like, then find a manufacturer for those designs) I’ll note I’ve been quite happy with the quality of fixtures I’ve gotten from both *Chloe* and *Amora* and both are generally reasonably priced.

To support my studio photography in here, I’ve added a Neewer C-Stand. At the time I did it I wondered if I was insane stuffing something like that in the office, but it allows me to set up and breakdown the studio for macro or product photography in about 15 minutes, vs about an hour or more in my original setup. It has two arms on it, one for the ring list you see in the photo, and one that I attach backgrounds to, and it’s turned out to be quite flexible and fast, which means I’m a lot more likely to actually use it. I’ll go into more details on my studio setup in another piece, again, um, *soonish*.

On the Walls

That pretty much sums up the functional pieces here in the office. I have gotten questions at times from people who’ve seen what I’ve got on the walls and up on the shelves for display, so I thought I’d also show those off and explain why they’re there.

On the wall behind my computer desk are three photos. From left to right, it’s a signed print by Michael Frye, a signed print by William Neill, and a print from Ansel Adams. All three photos are compositions taken in Yosemite National Park, which should not be surprising to you, is a very important location to me. I took a workshop from Michael in 2014 and would like to take another one some day; Neill is another famous Yosemite photographer who’s work I’ve studied because it’s something I’ve been trying to learn how to integrate into my own photography, and spending a day or two with him in Yosemite is on my short list of things to figure out how to make happen when I can. And if I could take a workshop with Ansel, I would, but I’m a bit late to the game for that, but he (with Galen Rowell being the another) was a huge early influence on me. On my list for 2020 is to add a print from Art Wolfe. I’d also add one from Rowell, but with their Mountain Light Gallery closed, getting a legitimate one where the money flows back to the estate is problematic.

To my right is the one image of my own in my office, a 40 inch canvas of a gorgeous elk from my 2014 Yellowstone trip. He set up shop along the road near Artist’s Point and spent a few days reveling in the traffic chaos he created, but it gave us an opportunity for some good photography while the rangers tried desperately to keep other tourists from getting run over by tour buses. He’s been up on the wall long enough, I soon need to choose a new photo and replace him with something new to stare at and see the flaws in.

I’m one of those people who believes what folks put up on display opens a window into themselves for others to interpret; I fully admit I consciously think about what stories I want my shelves to tell when I decide what to put up. Here is what I’ve curated on the top of my bookcases because it both gives me enjoyment to stare at when I’m avoiding working, and because I think it helps explain a bit who I am to others.

I used to be a much more serious collector of plush toys, especially teddy bears, than I am today. At some point I started to simplify my life, and so I reduced my bear collection through giveaways and donations. I still have a core set of bears that I expect to keep the rest of my life, but it’s not exactly the 25 feet of bears I used to have.

Here there are three plush toys. The white bear is Barfy. I had him custom made, and he was my seat partner at many Sharks (and for that one glorious year, the San Francisco Spiders), much to the amusement (mostly) of the referees on the ice. I will say most NHL referees have a good sense of humor. The occasional one that didn’t, we had even more fun with.

The plaid bear is one I bought the weekend I flew out to Purdue University and met Laurie for the first time, when she was still in school and I was headed to Alabama on a business trip. It has lived with me ever since, and Laurie joined us a few months later when she graduated.

The dragon was a gift from a college girlfriend, the one, in fact, that annointed me with the nickname chuqui-with-a-q, which kinda stuck with me a lot longer than she did, although we stayed friends long after we stopped being a couple.

The macintosh is an original 128K Mac. I obtained it in 2019 from some friends who found it in someone’s closet as they were cleaning the house out after he passed away, and they gave it to me because they knew I’d appreciate it. At some point I want to find the right place to donate it where it’ll get taken care of, but until then, given how important Apple’s been to my life, it shares my office and I take great pride in having it.

The gargoyle — actually a grotesque, since building gargoryles would have a water spout — is a 14th century tuscan reproduction, and it lived with me at Apple for over a decade, being the easy way for someone to find my office. I kept it in my office mostly because it amused me, and because nobody else had one. Which amused me.

The mask, one of many I own, is by Tim Lafontaine, a member of the Cree tribe who moved to Vancouver and took up carving in the Northwest styles, primarily Kwakwaka’. It was the first mask I bought when I started collecting first nations art of the northwest tribes, and represents the Raven. The small carving below it is Argillite, a stone primarily used by the Haida for their carvings and historically based on the Island of Haida Gwaii.

In the center section, front and center, is a bowl carved as a loon, by artist Erroll Ashley. Ashley is another Cree carving in the Northwest Kwagiulth style. Behind it is a small totem pole for which my artist information has gone missing (sorry, artist); it represents a thunderbird on top of a bear. The two loons to the right are tourist trinkets and are there because, well.. I’m a birder and I love loons.

The bear is a Steiff Winnie the Pooh from the mid 1980s. I hesitate to guess what it might be worth if I ever looked. There’s a surprising amount of Disney and Pooh stuff around this place, but this is one of the best bears in my collection. To the right is Jimminy Cricket, a plush I bought when I was working at Disneyland back in the 1970s.

On the wall, the mask on the right is by Kwakiulth artist Andy Bruce, representing the Thunderbird spirit, or the act of transformation of a person into the Thunderbird. To the left of that is a Haida-style bear, at artist Pat Gamble.

Finally, on the left section, a number of random things including a broken arrow through the head I used to use in staff meetings, and my newest art purchase, a gorgeous Coast Salish bear etched glass piece by Joe Wilson I picked up last summer in victoria (more about that here). There’s also a small Inuit Inukshuk (Inuit stone carving being another thing Laurie and I collect), and an antique clock, which was my grandfather’s.

And that covers the fun stuff in the office, although if you look below in that last picture, you’ll see a shelf stuffed overfull with books — they’re all birding references…..

I do plan on talking more about the art I’ve collected down the road. One of the projects I have planned for 2020 is to take new photos of them both for this web site and for insurance…

It’s hard to believe it, but it’s been over two months since I headed to Washington and took the Photo Workshop/Retreat from Art Wolfe in Olympic National Park. Time is just flying away this year (mostly in a good way).

I’ve had a number of people ask me if what I got out of the workshop and whether I got my money’s worth, and so I’ve been trying to figure out how to properly explain that.

The short answer: I thought then workshop was of great value to me and was well worth the time and money, most of the reasons why are subjective and not easy to explain. For instance, when I’m out shooting, I find I’m seeing possible compositions differently, trying to think more in terms of the structure of the composition as opposed to just the primary subject, even if it’s something like a bird. I’m finding I’m slowing down and thinking more and trying to plan my shots ahead, and therefore actually pressing the shutter less. Even with bird photography where so much is recognize and react work trying to catch things as the birds go through their normal activity, I’m choosing my locations differently and being more away of the compositional aspects and light of a shot before settling in to see if something is going to happen. I’m wasting less time taking shots I’ll throw away because of image clutter or bad light, so I believe overall, the quality of my in-camera images are better and there are fewer dings and throwaways because I’m learning to not take a shot that I can see won’t work.

Where I think it’s easier to show how things have changed is my digital darkroom work. For example, take a look at these two images of a Bald Eagle I shot a couple of years ago. One is my original processing result from 2017, and the other was one I just did because I was about to send it out for use by someone and I’m routinely re-processing images to bring them up to date before I do that.

Can you tell which is which?

Yes, the one with the darker sky is the new image.

One thing Art did in his critiques was take the raw unprocessed files, and then do a quick edit on them in front of everyone. Not only did that mean you had nowhere to hide when it came to getting good captures in camera, it gave us all a good look at his editing workflow. He uses Lightroom for these critiques, for what it’s worth.

One thing he does that initially just blew me away as insane: he immediately sets highlights to -100 and shadows to +100. I quickly realized that this made a lot of sense; effectively what you’re doing is maximizing detail and local contrast in the mid-tones, and then adjusting from there. When I had that realization, I told Art I was stealing this and planning to adopt it into my own workflow, and so I have (with credit!).

In all the lightroom tutorials I’ve looked at over the years, I’ve never see someone do this, and yet, when you look at the results, it seems obvious.

Another thing I took from his critiques: focus on the subject, get it right in the image. I found that I was spending too much time trying to both the main subject and all of the surrounding background stuff right, and in reality, much of that is wasted energy. Which doesn’t mean you ignore it, but if the subject is correct, the background will allmost always complement it (if, of course, you plan your compositions properly).

A third: lots of local enhancements, rather than trying to do most of the work with global ones. Use the global tools to get the basics of the image right, and then focus on using local enhancements — the brush, the fill tools — to optimize the image. This is where the luminance and color masks in the radial fill and gradient fill are really your friends.

I have actually created an import preset that automatically sets some basic values on every image I import, and that includes this -100/+100 adjustment, along with some basic tweaks to think like texture, clarity and my default sharpening values. You can (and should) always review and tweak these, but I know — in general — where I want my starting points to be.

I also have one personally recommendation: I’ve taken to setting a snapshot whenever a finish an image. When I go back and tweak or reprocess it, I’ll set one when I start and finish that round of changes. That way, I can easily find every revision of an image over time without having to try to find these points in the history. This new habit came in really handy recently when I did an update of a set of images and published them, and then didn’t realize that when I had them all selected, his the “auto” button. When I later realized the images looked weird and it was easy to identify which had been modified (hint: select the base of your image collection and set the view sort to “edit time/descending”), and quickly set them back.

One side result of this: I’m spending less time tweaking images. Thanks to the snapshots above, I can see the reprocess of this image too about 7 minutes and 30 seconds start to end. I think the quality has taken a distinct step forward, but I’m also finding I expect different thinks out of the images when I decide they deserve some darkroom time.

I’ll also note this image especially benefits from the texture tool in Lightroom, which is new to the recent releases and didn’t exist when I did the initial processing. I will deserve the “you need to remember to reprocess your worthy images as you mature” and “you really benefit from keeping your tools up to date and learn to use the new features that are added” arguments to some other time (you’re welcome. but it’s true, he says staring at my friends who like to tell me they’re fine continue with Lightroom 6, or in one case, Adobe CS 3. Yes, you. You’re kidding yourself).

The thing I like about this image is that it shows quite objectively how some things I learned at the workshop have paid off. Other things like how it’s changed my view of composition and light in the field show up more in where I don’t waste time on an image that won’t work, but here, the change is both visible and obvious.

And yes, Bald Eagles are majestic birds, aren’t they?

And yes, workshops can be totally worth the time and money, as long as you know what you want to accomplish going in, are willing to be taught while there, and then put in the time and energy to implement what you learn instead of falling back into old habits again once home. The value is there, you just have to grab it and drag it home with you.

(November 1: for a few changes I’ve made since writing this, please see this post)

It’s time to update my post on what’s in my camera bag and what I carry with me when I head out in the field. There’s been a massive amount of change to my kit since I last documented it in 2017 — as in almost everything — but I think the changes have made me a better and more thoughtful photographer.

Since the last time I wrote about my gear, I have sold off the last of my Canon gear, I’ve upgraded to then Fuji X-T3, with my X-T2 going to my wife (replacing her X-T1), and I’ve added a Fuji X-T20 as a second body and as the camera I use for Behind the Scenes stuff, video and B-roll, and general “whatever my main camera body isn’t doing” work. I’ll also say that during the time when the brand-new Fuji X-T3 went off for repair after I dropped the thing, I used the X-T20 as my primary camera and I felt effectively no compromises in the work I did during that month. I’ve also put some effort into upgrading my lenses, as I’ll talk about shortly, and rethink how much stuff I carry and why I carry it — which I’ll also go into details about.