I got out finally after the ice storm Fern and went to Old Settler's pond. There were the usual assortment of ducks and egrets. I some Red-winged Blackbirds which is slightly unusual. Three White-winged Doves sitting in a tree (they looked cold). But the big adventure was a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks! Weee!!!! 😀
I hope you enjoy the images.
Winter Storm Fern came to town. I woke to 20º and sleet on the ground. I got my drone out and flew a quick lap and then spent the rest of the day trying to figure out a new tool for videos: DaVinci Resolve. It is a relatively simple video but I hope you find it relaxing.
There is a winter storm coming. I didn't know this but now they name winter storms. The one coming is "Winter Storm Fern". Gosh...
Anyhow, I thought the cold weather might be pushing birds, ducks in particular, down south. Lake Devine in Leander had a lot of ducks a few weeks ago but the last time I was there, it wasn't mostly empty. I wanted to go check it out today to see how populated it was. I figure there were about 400 ducks there.
But as I looked at the ducks, I kept noticing other birds. Birds which were odd in Williamson county.
The images is one of each of the species I identified today: fifteen of them. The Ring-necked Duck is the frontmost duck in that image. The other ducks in the image are Redheads and American Wigons. The Wilson's Snipe is my first.
I hope you enjoy the images.
As the previous blog post suggests, I started birding. I started this mostly to fight depression and anxiety and the negative thoughts and feelings that I was having. But when I post my images, I wanted the images to have tags. So I got off on various tangents. One was to write a script to tag the images. I didn't know how I wanted the process to work. I didn't know how I wanted Lightroom, SmugMug, and this blog to work. Along the way, I got off on another tagent (not finished) of going through all of my images since 2001 and finding the birds and properly identifying them. Then I wanted to add them to my "Life List" on ebird. While doing this, I got off on another tangent (also not completed) of going through all my images from a 2007 trip to Antarctica that I took. And, you guessed it, this got me off on yet another third tagent to find and enter reasonably accurate GPS coordinates for all of the roughly 4000 images.
There was a ship's GPS log passed around at one point but I don't have it; I never did. And so far everyone I've contacted doesn't have it either. But I found a really accurate blog post and I have used it to get accurate GPS locations through the trip. Side note: I think I have gone through life only half aware of reality. This blog post has way more detail than I ever knew about and he was just an equal participant like me.
So, the Antarctice images have been GPS tagged and reverse tagged (going from GPS to country, state, city, etc). And I have found about 25 differnt birds that I saw and photographed during the trip. I will make a blog post about these in a day or two. For now, here are the birds I found in December of 2025 tagged like I wanted them. Please share your thoughts on the tagging, life, and Pluto (the dog).
Maybe a week ago, I started a project and then got side tracked into better organizing my photos. In particular, I wanted to clean up and document all of the birds I had sighted over the years. The reason is there is a site called eBird.org that will email out a list of sightings that you may be interested in. And for the past week or so, there has been a sighting of a Vermilion Flycatcher at the local Old Settler's Park. I went out yesterday but didn't park in the right place because of construction. So I went out again today and got a photograph of the bird.
In order, we have an American Pipit, the Vermilion Flycatcher (with a fly!!), a Northern Shoveler, a Lesser Scaup, a Bufflehead, and finally a Gadwall. Weee!!!
A friend of mine seemed very interested in the fall colors trip I just took and she was sick so I thought I would try and lift her spirits by sending her the link to my Fall Colors 2010 Gallery on SmugMug. But... it turns out, I didn't have said gallery.
"Ok", I thought, "I'll just create one since I have ready access to all the images."
Turns out, I didn't. I had the raw files but not the final images. Lets back up a bit.
In the fall of 2010, I took a trip leaving Leander up to Wisconsin, visited some cousins, and then went on north to the upper peninsula of Michigan. I finally circled back around on the southern side of the peninsula and headed back home. The whole trip took from September 12th to October 15th. I spent the day time working remotely and would get up and do photography in the mornings and evenings often during golden hour or blue hour.
I had two Canon cameras: the 1D Mk II and 1Ds Mk II. And I had a 6cm by 8cm medium format Fuji GX 680 with tons of lenses. The problem is that the camera was starting to get old and its film canister had a light leak so I didn't get many of the images but I did get quite a few.
I even self published a book about the trip that you can see here.
Coming back to recent times, when I went to find all of the images, the medium format images in particular I had only the raw images and not the final processed images I used in the book. Also, the book was published via Lightroom's "Book" module and so my Lightroom catalog should have had all the info about the book but it had none. I assume I started a fresh catalog and never brought in the old catalog from this trip.
To bore you even more, I'll explain that as I've gone through laptops and computers over at least the past 20 years if not longer, I never threw out the old hard drives. I kept them all. A few years ago, I bought a huge storage system (called a NAS) and put all the drives on it, created a program to index everything and find duplicates. Lightroom has a special type of file that it keeps its data in so I could search the NAS for that particular type of file, look at the modification dates, and quickly narrow down the most likely catalog that I had used during the trip and creating the book.
Long story short, I found the catalog and all the edited images used in the book. I added them to my current Master Catalog and published the gallery up to SmugMug. You can see all the images here.
Here is a sequence of a Great Egret swallowing a fish. Its sorta neat I think.
