The issue is that Adobe have changed their upgrade policy on the quiet. Instead of being able to wait a release or two and then being able to upgrade at a reduced cost, Adobe have announced that from now on you can only upgrade in this way from the previous release.

“With regards to upgrades, we are changing our policy for perpetual license customers. In order to qualify for upgrade pricing when CS6 releases, customers will need to be on the latest version of our software (either CS5 or CS5.5 editions).”

This comes embedded within an announcement regarding a new subscription model called “Adobe Creative Cloud“.

In practice, what this means is that you can only upgrade to the upcoming CS6 from CS5. So if like me you were going to wait and upgrade from CS4 (I was out of work for a while and needed to look after the pennies!), you can’t now do that.

There has been a bit of reaction, and Scott Kelby has gone out of his way to write an open letter to Adobe on the matter.

You may decide that the version of Photoshop you are on is good enough, and this action may convince you that you have spent enough with Adobe.

But there is another option if you do need the latest and greatest features – if you act in the next few days, you can get an upgrade from Adobe at a 30% discount in a Black Friday sale – valid from today (Wednesday 23rd November) until 11.59 on the 29th. Go to the Adobe Store offer page. You should see a link to Photoshop CS5, and the full price, after checking your country/adobe credentials (You have bought a previous version, haven’t you?!). Click that link and eventually you will get to the checkout – there you will see the discount applied, while valid.

If you miss the 30% offer, there is a 20% offer till the end of December.

I was in Hatfield Forest a couple of weeks ago, and I came across a family of grebes having breakfast. Well, it seemed like it to me, being very early in the morning.

Before we start, I must say that the “book” on Grebes tells you that – “The Crested Grebe feeds mainly on fish, but also little crustaceans, insects and small frogs.”. Also that the Mother feeds the young early on smaller items, with the Father taking over as they grow, and fetching the larger food.

I’m on the boardwalk by the lake, near the teashop (closed – too early!), looking out over the lake, when I hear a splash at my feet. Either I had disturbed it, or it had been in the process of killing it’s prey, I’m not sure, but I just managed to catch a Grebe making off with it’s precious catch, a Lobster.

Hang on tho’, you don’t get Lobsters in lakes! So it must a, err, Crayfish? But that’s a huge Crayfish. Did I read something about American Crayfish sometime ago? They must be from Texas.

As we see in a bit this is the mother, and that is not a “small crustacean” – this family have not read the book. So the Grebe swims off, and tries to feed it to it’s chick – right!

First of all the Chick seems interested, but for some strange reason, doesn’t know what to do with it. It can’t hold the food, and it drops in the water.

This is literally, rinsed, and repeated for some time.

Dad eventually hoves into view, to give the benefit of his advice, while Junior is beginning to get a bit fed up with being told he can’t have his dessert unless he eats his meat.

Mum gets a bit fed up with Junior, while he complains to Dad about not getting the Turkey nuggets he normally has…

Mother Grebe is not about to waste this food – down in a couple of gulps!

“Never fear”, my hosts says, “we’ll go for a short walk around the lake”, the lake in question being Derwent Water. But I have my camera, and despite the rain, the autumn colours shine through, and I make lots of stops. Not a problem – very leisurely does it.

Approaching the top end of the lake, with Keswick as the start point, and walking clockwise around it, we approach the Lodore Hotel, and behind it the Falls. We thought we were near when we could hear the roaring in the distance, but it took us a while before we got there, and I guess this was because of the spate it was in, thanks to the rain. Along the way my companion begins reciting a poem – and as we reach the falls everything drops into place – the rain, the sounds, the poem, the autumn colours, and of course, Lodore Falls.

The Cataract of Lodore

‘How does the water
Come down at Lodore?’
My little boy asked me

Thus, once on a time;Lodore Falls
And moreover he tasked me
To tell him in rhyme.
Anon, at the word,
There first came one daughter,
And then came another,
To second and third
The request of their brother,
And to hear how the water
Comes down at Lodore,
With its rush and its roar,
As many a time
They had seen it before.
So I told them in rhyme,
For of rhymes I had store;
And ’twas in my vocation
For their recreation
That so I should sing;
Because I was Laureate
To them and the King.

From its sources which well
In the tarn on the fell;
From its fountains
In the mountains,
Its rills and its gills;
Through moss and through brake,
It runs and it creeps
For a while, till it sleeps
In its own little lake.
And thence at departing,

Awakening and starting,
It runs through the reeds,
And away it proceeds,
Through meadow and glade,
In sun and in shade,
And through the wood-shelter,
Among crags in its flurry,
Helter-skelter,
Hurry-skurry.
Here it comes sparkling,
And there it lies darkling;
Now smoking and frothing
Its tumult and wrath in,
Till, in this rapid race
On which it is bent,
It reaches the place
Of its steep descent.

The cataract strong
Then plunges along,
Striking and raging
As if a war waging
Its caverns and rocks among;
Rising and leaping,
Sinking and creeping,
Swelling and sweeping,
Showering and springing,
Flying and flinging,
Writhing and ringing,
Eddying and whisking,
Spouting and frisking,
Turning and twisting,
Around and around
With endless rebound:
Smiting and fighting,
A sight to delight in;
Confounding, astounding,

Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound.

Collecting, projecting,
Receding and speeding,
And shocking and rocking,
And darting and parting,
And threading and spreading,
And whizzing and hissing,
And dripping and skipping,
And hitting and splitting,
And shining and twining,
And rattling and battling,
And shaking and quaking,

The Falls at Lodore

And pouring and roaring,
And waving and raving,
And tossing and crossing,

And flowing and going,
And running and stunning,
And foaming and roaming,
And dinning and spinning,
And dropping and hopping,

And working and jerking,
And guggling and struggling,
And heaving and cleaving,
And moaning and groaning;

And glittering and frittering,
And gathering and feathering,
And whitening and brightening,

And quivering and shivering,

And hurrying and skurrying,
And thundering and floundering;

Dividing and gliding and sliding,
And falling and brawling and sprawling,

And driving and riving and striving,
And sprinkling and twinkling and wrinkling,

And sounding and bounding and rounding,
And bubbling and troubling and doubling,

And grumbling and rumbling and tumbling,
And clattering and battering and shattering;

Retreating and beating and meeting and sheeting,
Delaying and straying and playing and spraying,
Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing,

Recoiling, turmoiling and toiling and boiling,
And gleaming and streaming and steaming and beaming,
And rushing and flushing and brushing and gushing,
And flapping and rapping and clapping and slapping,

And curling and whirling and purling and twirling,
And thumping and plumping and bumping and jumping,
And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing;
And so never ending, but always descending,
Sounds and motions for ever and ever are blending

All at once and all o’er, with a mighty uproar, -
And this way the water comes down at Lodore.

Robert Southey

With thanks to Vaughan.         More Lake District shots here.

So the sites are in transition at the moment, and as soon as I have put the images from the Clikpic gallery into my zenphoto one, I will close the clikpic one down.  But if you find yourself over on “Clikpic”, you will notice you can’t get back to zenphoto by clicking – you need to re-enter the url.

And “Catsnaps”, for those who know about it, will also go – I can put friends and family photos on zenphoto, and password protect. Then just the one site to manage – phew!

Nice to have some good news to report.

WARNINGS were issued to aircraft over Scotland yesterday after a bird of prey centre lost a vulture which is capable of soaring at heights of more than 30,000 feet.

PostScript – It seems a story like this can’t pass without somone trying to make more of it than is really necessary – “Giant vulture menaces Scottish skies”  shouts The Register.

It’s tame, it’s lost, but oh no, anything we don’t understand is a threat.

Hoverfly

I counted 6 Hoverflies around my Agapanthus and Purple Loose-strife the other day, and just 1 bee.

I took a number of pictures, which you have to do working in macro mode with fast moving creatures, but as with a number of activities, practice makes perfect, and I gradually approached my goal.

Hoverfly 2

Not easy to follow these, handholding a 50-200mm lens (need to work on those arms !),  so several rests in between shots, which allows for review, and change of position.

The Zuiko 50-200mm at full bore is eqv. to 400mm, and I used a Canon close-up lens (500D) on the front for the closer shots.

A couple of learning points for next time – slightly deeper depth of field, and possibly trying to attach a ringflash for less severe glare. I used the pop-up flash for fill-in, but I expect the lens blocked off a fair bit of that. Possibly a tripod as well, as even with in-body stabilisation there could easily be movement blur entering the equation.

But with some perseverence , I got the shot I was after. the insect in parallel with the lens and just enough depth of field to show the creature at it’s best.

From a bit of research I believe this is the Marmalade hoverfly, Episyrphus balteatus, unless anyone can advise other wise.

Hoverfly 3

The next goal will be to capture some of these in flight, actually hovering, but that’s for another day.

I offer prints from most of the sections.

You can buy in several sizes, from 6×4 to A3+. These are hand printed using pigmented inks for long life colour.

If you want larger sizes, or international orders, please let me know and I can sort something out.

You have 2 options, print only, or matted.

Matted means mounted with a card “window” suitable for dropping into a locally sourced frame.

Little Owl matted

Watermarks as seen on images on the site will be removed.

Postage is included for the UK.

Shown here is an example of an A4 print, matted with a cream-coloured mount, with a ruler for scale. This matte size is 40×30 cm (c. 16″x12″), a common frame size.

Adobe CS5 launch logo

You can find out all about it here, where you can register for an on-line webcast.

But be aware that whilst this is called a “launch”, it’s really a tease – you won’t be able to buy it until later in the year, at least a month later at the earliest anyway. I think that there’s been a number of rumours – a few people have been helping out with the beta and have been itching to tell all, so this is Adobe’s way of going formal with the features that will be made available.

What’s in it for me?

Well there is something called “content aware scaling” (or “fill” depending on where you look), which is a fancy name for a smart cloning tool. From what I can see, instead of tedious brush strokes with clone stamp/healing brush, this will do the work for you. If it saves time, and looks good, then this is going to go down well with pro photographers, where time is money.

Now as a Nature photographer, you and I don’t do cloning do we?

Weeeelll, maybe a bit of “gardening”, you know, just a bit of weeding, to remove dead leaves on the ground, branches distracting from birds in the trees, filling in the edges of those panorama shots where you took a couple less shots than you should have… so it builds into something that could save a lot of time and effort.

I think I saw something that is going to help with HDR (“high dynamic range”) shots, to end those over-grey clouds.

And maybe it will be faster too, they always say that don’t they, but of course, again anything that saves time… But there might be a 64 bit version for the MAC, and possibly better tuning on the PC.

Something to look out for if you are on version CS or earlier, and thinking of upgrading to CS5 – I believe that upgrading will only be allowed back 3 versions, so you may want to consider your options on upgrading to CS 4 now, if you need these features of CS5.

No word on prices as yet, maybe that will be made known on Monday.

Colorado Grey Jay

We quite often like to see and photograph nature subjects as close as we can get – we get see certain features in close up, maybe an expression, but certainly fur/feather detail and colouration, with any background (“bg”) details rendered out of focus. Such a photo as this, of a Grey (or Gray) Jay.

A better example would have the subject larger in the frame, with a really blurred background. But you can see the colours, and some feather detail.

A caveat, which is that these images were taken on a compact, so with a DSLR one should expect more isolation of the subject.

Now by accident, when looking for identification confirmation (I’m not a native of the US, and needed to know what this was), that I found out that one of this bird’s  nickname is “The Camp Robber”, for its scavenging from humans.

So you can see from the first image that it is close to habitation (despite being a “native of conifer forests”). If I expand

the crop we get more of a clue to this nature – what has the bird got it’s eye on?

Gray Jay and Bin

Here in the second image we see a not very picturesque rubbish bin.

It seems the bird has a more than healthy interest in this feature!

The last image now shows why this bird deserves it’s nickname.

Not far from it’s forest home, but displaying the behaviour that earns it’s nickname. It’s slightly humourous, but would it win any prizes as a photo image?

The animal in its environment picture tells us a lot about behaviour, whether its pretty or ugly.

"Robber" Grey Jay at the Bin

In between times I have tried out a couple of vga cards, and found a fix for the printer issue.

1. HP Deskjet 720 printer issue.

An old printer, but I have a store of ink for it, and it works networked for my other PCs and my partners (XP). I thought there were no drivers for Win 7 , but HP updated these. Unfortunately, they may have worked for Win7 32-bit, but not 64-bit. Wasted a lot of time on that – could install it, the OS showed it was set up, but it kept failing just as I sent the print. Looked like a print spooler/driver issue.

Well I was not alone – many others complaining in various forums, but HP eventually got round to finding a fix. The annoying thing about this is that the answer may have been under my nose all along. It was found by re-using a driver file from Win server 2003, which as it happens is very equivalent to Win XP Pro 64.

Whatever, HP have now released 3 patch files, which can be downloaded from their site, in case you have also suffered this problem -

“There is an issue with the 64 bit Visa and Windows 7 drivers that causes the spooler to crash with the following Deskjet printers:

Deskjet 710

Deskjet 712

Deskjet 720

Deskjet 722

Deskjet 810

Deskjet 812

Deskjet 820

Deskjet 822

Deskjet 1000

The attached file contains a patch for this issue.  Apply the patch as follows: First make sure the driver for the printer is installed.   Log into the computer with an administrative account.  Download the patch by clicking on this link or on the paper clip at the end of this post.  Save the patch file to your computer, then unzip it.  Next copy the three DLL files to the following directory:

%windir%\system32\spool\drivers\x64\3

This can be done from a DOS prompt if DOS is opened with the “run as administrator” command, or from explorer with a copy and paste.  Depending on your UAC settings you may need to provide confirmation.  Also allow the current files to be overwritten if prompted.

This patch is not required and should not applied to a 32 bit version of Vista or Windows 7.”

Problem solved, and all is now working, but the last word on printers comes to you courtesy of The Oatmeal.

2. Matrox vga card.

I reported that Matrox were not writing drivers for Win7 for their older cards (despite a driver being available for XP 64 bit) – I received the following from a Matrox rep -

“The P650 series of cards have been announced as “End-of-life”. This means that we will not be building any more cards and will not be doing any development work on drivers etc.  Therefore, this card does not support Windows 7.”

So I cast about for a replacement. I thought to try ATI Radeon, as I had only ever tried Nvidia or Matrox, and had heard that ATI might have cards better suited  for dual monitors. 1st up was a 4670, which I found to be underpowered – less powerful than my back up 8600GT. I believe the colours were quite neutral tho, so I pressed on – trying a 4850, which never got out of the box when I found it didn’t have dual-DVI, and then a failed e-bay purchase, also of a 4850.

Took a breather, looked at the latest specs, and changed to looking at the latest line from ATI, the 5000-series. The 5750 looked to have low power requirements, fast memory, as well as cool running, and the 5000-series has been built with dual and triple monitors in mind. At the last moment I upgraded to a 5770, for a few pounds more, with a slightly meatier spec.

Photoshop now can use vga memory in support of it own needs, which could well help when editing large files -

“Photoshop CS4 leverages the graphics display card’s GPU, instead of the computer’s main processor (the CPU) to speed its screen redraw. For Photoshop to access the GPU, your display card must contain a GPU that supports OpenGL and has enough RAM to support Photoshop functions–at least 128 MB of RAM–and a display driver that supports OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0″. – Adobe.

Only had this a few days but it’s working fine, and appears to be working as well if not better then the old Matrox card. Thanks to the time gap between the purchases, the new card has faster and more memory, as well as the appropriate OpenGL features. Win7 and colour management play well together as well.

I know I used to spend a bit of time organising my darkroom, and the PC has now taken it’s place, but perhaps I can concentrate on the photography now.

Willow in Snow by the Lake

Sometimes we might think that we need to travel half way across the world to get the best landscape or nature photographs, but there are plenty of benefits to staying local – getting to know your patch means becoming aware of the possibilities – knowing how the light changes through the day and across the seasons, and then being able to be on the spot when it comes together.

The  recent weather (December/January!)  is a major case in point – a shot of  something I’ve waited some years for – and a second which was an unanticipated surprise. The first was in the local park – and some scenes around a  lake which I had been thinking would throw up some possibilities given some ice and snow.

What brought it to life for me though was some added sun, patches of  blue sky, and an interesting foreground subject.

The second image was completely unexpected in both location and time.

St. John's in the snow, evening before Christmas 2009.

Trudging back through the snow from the local shops, whilst the main road was gridlocked with noise and pandemonium ensuing, just before Christmas, I turned the corner, and found as oasis of peace and warmth. Now I’m no church-goer, but it looked like a picture book setting given the right angles, and was a possibility not to be thrown up.  I walked home and back again with my kit, (making sure my feet got properly wet!), and took a few long exposures in the evening light.

This could be next year’s card.

Both taken within walking distance of my home.

Mark

So today I picked up another one, but this one seemed to have a bit more about it – a high pass sharpener (which I normally use), but with the option to selectively brush in the sharpening where needed only.

Feeding Magpie in Grass

So here I only want the bird sharpened – tick- but more than that, I can use the layer mask used to sharpen the bird, inverted, to then add a touch more blur to the background – double tick (maybe I should do more and remove those bush branches – can’t decide at the mo’).

I can think of  many examples where this can be used for wildlife/nature images.

The action is  available from David Taylor at SixtyOne North, and he’s a top man for supplying it gratis!

And so begins a trail/trial of hours of frustration! Not going to document the whole story here but the main issue was lack of drivers for my

1. Matrox vga card
2. HP printer.

These were not issues that can be resolved by using Vista drivers.  No 1 was fudged by taking out my Nvidia card from the back up PC. The reason I use it as back up is because the colours are not as stable/accurate, and yes, photographers are fussy! I’ll just have to wait and see if Matrox get round to releasing updates.

Nvidia by the way are just a bit ahead of these guys – working functionality for the card comes via a beta driver!

No.2 looks like it’s not going away – it’s an old printer for sure, but that’s no reason why drivers can’t be updated – I use it for documents /webpages and the like, where I don’t want to waste the expensive inks of my photo printer. Which in contrast has had new drivers made available in good time, and are definitely a major improvement over previous files (HP B9180).

See   PC_World (“HP says windows 7 drivers are coming”).

and  PC_Advisor (“If your legacy product is not listed, no support is offered for Windows 7.”)

Update :- HP’s story on drivers here, but it’s not working for me!

It was my impression that MS and the 3rd party manufacturers had learnt lessons from the Vista release, and got everything in order in time for the release – I had 2 pre-release versions of Win 7 at least as far back as March to get used to it, so why can’t the manufacturers be prepared? Is it a case of being laggardly to encourage users to spend money on upgrading equipment? – that’s not very green when in all other respects this is good working equipment. And the worst of it are the frustrating hours tracking down potential solutions which in the end are just blind alleys.

Of course the alternative is going back to my previous set up (I took a cloned copy just in case of such an eventuality), and waiting to see if updates are forthcoming.

11/02/10 – Update – movement on the printer story, and a workround for the vga card – see part 3.

I have a back up PC which I am in the process of upgrading to Win7 64-bit Home Premium. I have run the Release Candidate version on it prior to this, and was reasonably confident that the full install would work.

Running a 2-core AMD Opteron processor with 4GB memory, it’s running at roughly eqv speeds to my main machine, a 4-core Intel Q6600 with 8GB memory running WinXP Pro 64-bit, although not yet fully loaded (PS etc.).

The install (clean) I have found to be the fastest of any of Microsoft’s thus far – it found all my devices and had drivers for them without me having to dig out discs (e.g. nforce 4 device drivers) and manual installing.

One thing that helped the install was having a dedicated partition for operating system – all my image files are on separate disks to start with.

XP Pro, whilst fast, was not fully supported either by MS, or other suppliers, so I was having to work round certain needs – e.g. my HP printer was limited in use, with frequent dropouts. Win7 is claimed to fix a number of USB issues, and I’m looking forward to that, together with the new drivers that HP brought out specific to Win 7.

I have since found that I had to install one driver manually, which was for the Eye-1 display 2 I use for monitor calibration. On the positive side, I can confirm Win 7  automatically manages 2 monitor profiles for a dual-screen set up.

Still got some way to go on this install but so far so good.  Need to install 2 scanners, and will look at the speed of PhotoShop on this set-up, compared with my main PC.

The rewards can be worth it tho’, with behaviour and scenes that would be unrepeatable during the rest of the day.

We have got used to seeing animals behave according to our whims, thanks to Zoos and reserves, where animals can be fed at our convenience rather than theirs. But if we want to take interesting images of wildlife, we need to dance to their tune.

I recently visited Richmond Park, where it has limited opening hours. However, a 7.30 start at the moment is equivalent to sunrise at the right time of year, and you won’t capture  many images before that time.  When I got there I saw 2 other photographers taking images of the deer. I followed a herd for the best part of 3 hours without seeing any more snappers.

Resting time at Richmond Park

I took a break at 10.30 (the herd moved along, and passed near the cafe – couldn’t resist a bacon sandwich!). When I returned, low and behold, lots of

photographers. The problem was, in that time, the sun had come out from behind the clouds, and the deer decided it was time for a rest. When they do this they lie down in thick undergrowth – not only difficult to find, but not providing the most exciting images.

So why take images like this…

When a couple of hours earlier, the same deer were posing?

Red Deer Stag, Richmond Park

Take part in the survey here if you are a photographer, and even better, if you have your own site , link to it directly yourself – the bigger the response, the better the results.

Photographer Social Media Survey.

Thanks to Guy Tal, (who’s site I visit a lot thanks to his terrific images), for pointing this survey out.

Large White Caterpillar - Pieris brassicae

Taken in my garden, literally just outside the back door. We’ve had a lot of Large Whites flying about in this part of N. London, and there seem to be a number of these caterpillars about, but I didn’t put the 2 events together until I did the i.d.. Taken at the end of August.

What: Close up of Large White caterpillar,  Pieris brassicae

How: Oly E-3,  Zuiko 50mm macro, 1.4tc, 1/160s, f8

Why: Bright subject colours, and the set of horizontal lines – edge of leaf, leaf vein, and caterpillar markings.