Botswana

After the local travel, it has been back to Botswana. Spent a few days at Oddballs Enclave in the delta. Superb place but with the water at its highest level in nearly 30 years game viewing was limited. However, I was able to see and photograph a Pel's Fishing Owl - with chick. Over the years I have been all over with many promises that we would "definitely" see one but to no avail. Well finally we did get to spot a female with her chick well hidden in a very large jackalberry tree on one of many islands near the camp. They hide from the Fish eagles during the day and are of course nocturnal so as not to compete directly with the Fish Eagles for fish. Being so well concealed it was difficult to get a great shot but managed a reasonable one with the 1D MarkIV and a 500mm f/4 lens together with a flash fitted with a Better Beamer.

Digital Workshop and School
   

I have always worked from home where I had a good computer set up and just about enough space to do the things I was doing. However as the computer system grew with multiple screens and more and more digital storage needs, never mind the space requirements for large format printers, I have decided to move into a suite of offices here in George. This now gives me the opportunity to do what I have always wanted to and that is to teach!
I continue to offer individualized tailor made tuition – whatever your need may be. From understanding your point-and-shoot to sophisticated post processing using layer-based PhotoShop techniques or the digital workflow offered by LightRoom. This will be on a one-on-one basis  or very small groups. Some pupils have made extraordinary progress towards becoming accomplished photographers.

Adobe Lightroom
Whilst being a reluctant starter, I am becoming more and more convinced that Lightroom will best serve most serious digital photographer’s workflow needs.  It is in essence a workflow tool for digital photographers. It is a one-stop all-encompassing program that downloads your pictures, backs them up simultaneously, organizes them, manages the meta-data and keywords, processes the RAW file if that is the format you captured the images in, produces slideshows and web galleries and a lot more.  If you are serious about digital photography and you are considering a major software purchase, then  I don’t think you can go far wrong with Lightroom. The Mac and PC versions are covered under one licence.

Computer system


I have more recently gone the Apple Mac route with my laptop and upgraded to a 17” MacBook Pro running both Windows 7 64 bit and Mac OS X v 10.6 Snow Leopard in parallel. The graphics are superb but  do think Windows slows things down a bit when using Parallels. Seems faster just using BootCamp but then you have the hassle of re-booting into each system.

My love affair with Mac continues. I now have a dual quad core Xeon 2.93 Ghz Mac Pro installed with 16B of memory. It has two display cards driving two 24" Apple LED Cinema displays which makes editing an absolute pleasure. Had some problems with drivers for Snow Leopard but pretty much sorted out now. Windows 7 running in parrallel initially also had a few driver issues. The Windows 7 system certainly runs Photoshop better than the Mac version even though it is now also 64 bit because many plug ins for Mac don't work with Mac 64 bit PS5. Lightroom (Mac version) is a 64 bit application and is my main program for sorting and RAW conversion. PS5 and Lightroom 3 both now have the same excellent RAW conversion.

Networking with the 17" Mac Book Pro is easy to set up and works very well.
Enough about hardware and software – after all we are here to get great images first and foremost!
     

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