NANPA Day Two

9:00am Keynote, Wendy Shattil and Rob Rozinski

This husband and wife team told us some of their personal history and showed us some really amazing images from Colorado. I'm more excited than ever to be going with them to Rocky Mountain National Park on Sunday.

After the session ended, my friend Beth told me she was increasingly certain I should show my images during portfolio review on my laptop rather than on paper.

10:30am, Breakout Session, Stock Agencies

We heard from three panelists about how photographers and stock agencies can and should work together, including many interesting anecdotes from Jane Kinne, who substituted for panelist Cathy Aron.

I left a bit early and retreated to my hotel room to whip up a laptop presentation. I have to admit, my filing system for JPEG's could use a bit of sprucing up, but I was able to gather a pretty good set of 800x600 images without too much trouble.

2:00pm Portfolio Review I

I spent half an hour with the photo editor of a popular birding magazine. He seemed to like some of my images pretty well, lingering over my Spotted Sandpiper and Willet. He patiently explained that he never needed to see yet another stereotypical Sandhill Crane, American Avocet, Burrowing Owl shot, and I can respect that.

3:00pm Portfolio Review II

I actually got an early start with my second review, a promiment photographer and workshop leader, thanks to a no-show at 2:30pm. He offered some great composition suggestions, proposing vertical crops of images I did as horizontal crops for my most recent calendar. I realized that after I crop an image one way it can be difficult to see it afresh and crop it a different way.

6:30pm, Conservation Photography event

We heard from three excellent photographers about various conservation projects they are involved in.

Robert Glenn Ketchum talked about the threatened salmon fishery of southwestern Alaksa and a boneheaded copper mine proposed by Ted Stevens. His landscape shots featuring carpets of brightly colored tundra plants and meandering mountain streams were breathtaking, hard to take in. He also talked about the successful effort to prevent development on the Hearst San Simeon ranch and the startling biodiversity he found there.

Michael Forsberg talked about his book On Ancient Wings, his book about Sandhill Cranes. He photographed them from nothern Alaksa to Cuba, from California to Florida, and everywhere in between. His reminiscences about his travels were eloquent, moving, and thoughtful.

C. C. Lockwood talked about marshmission.com, an interdisciplinary effort to promote awareness of the vanishing marshlands of the Mississippi River delta in Lousiana. Although he had everyone laughing with his swamp humor, his sorrow was palpable -- sorrow he must have felt after watching hurricanes do so much damage he says could have been prevented by better attention to marshes anytime during the last thirty years. Deeply moving.

NANPA Day One

8:30am Summit Opening

Master of Ceremonies John Nuhn started the festivities today with an amusing collection of songs about photography, pictures of NANPA luminaries in their salad days, his own first hummingbird shot, and a lovely tribute to his parents, who encouraged his photographic endeavors. Quite charming.

9:00am Keynote Address, Jack Dykinga

Mr. Dykinga is a view camera landscape photographer, in so many ways the complete opposite of what we bird photographers do. He shoots one to ten images per day with a shutter time of 10 to 100 seconds, whereas we shoot 500 images per day at a shutter time of 1/1000 of a second. Still, I really appreciated the way he talked about developing a relationship with his subject, in much the same way one hears human portrait photographers talk. His sequences of images of the same subjects in varying light reminded me of the Monet haystack paintings we travelled up to Chicago to see back in the 90's. Beautiful images from an entertaining presenter.

Said "hi" to Arthur Morris and Ellen Anon, my instructors from the November 2005 Bosque trip.

10:30am Critique panel

A photographer, a Photo editor, and a Stock agency representative review some thirty or forty images submitted to NANPA, of highly varying quality. Although they were at times rather brusque, it was very helpful to see things from their perspective.

Had lunch with my friend and fellow Bosque participant Beth Maynor Young.

12:30 Exhibits

The new Wimberely gimbal head is here, but they're backordered until March and don't have a show special. There is a deal on the LowePro RoadRunner AW, but not that great of a deal. I talked to Jim Cozad of Cozad Ranch, where they can charge photographers to sit in blinds all day on their working ranch, which I think is a brilliant way to get more use out of their land. I talked to a really cool high-end color printing lab conveniently located in nearby Santa Cruz. I learned that the cool kids are using a printer that actually fires colored lasers at conventional photographic paper which is subsequently processed with traditional paper printing chemistry. Who knew? Also, I learned that Giclee is a fancy french name for "ink jet". It's nice to demystify this stuff.

NANPA, Day Zero

Greetings from Denver!

It's really late here, I just wanted to record the fact that I arrived at this extremely new, extremely fancy hotel without incident. Not only does the room have a bigger TV than my house, the wall of the _elevator_ has bigger TV than my house embedded in it. Showing stock footage of buffalo. Good times.

A friend gave me her unused prepaid t-mobile card, which I think I just activated, so let's hope I get to stay connected all week without the extra $10 a day.

OK, better figure out what I'm doing tomorrow and get some sleep.

Ducks! Ducks! Ducks!

Harlequin Duck
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

Mary and I had a great day trip to Santa Cruz and Monterey. We saw lots of great birds. We've been down to Monterey every January for a few years now, but always on our own. This time we decided to prove to ourselves that we could manage this trip on our own, and I think we did really well. We saw our target birds, managed our time pretty well, and didn't get lost.

The bird of the day was almost certainly this male Harlequin Duck. When first I saw this bird in Monterey Harbor, I was so excited I couldn't even say its name, I just hollered out "Ducks! ducks! ducks!"

Snowy Owl! In California!

Snowy Owl
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

Life bird! Life bird! Along with most of the birders in the bay area, we descended on Liberty Island Road south of Davis this morning to see the first Snowy Owl recorded in California since 1978. Here are some more photos. What a day!

Pre-flight defecation

We had a great trip with the Santa Clara Valley Audubon folks to Ogier Ponds today (for more details see the photos or trip list). This Osprey was one of the birds of the day, and capturing this moment immediately prior to take-off was definitely the photo of the day.

From the Archive: "Electric Build-it Set"

Growing up, I had a lot of building and science-oriented toys. This is one of the ones I don't remember all that well, but I thought we could all enjoy the artwork on the box, which is straight out of the Tom Swift novels I used to check out of the library.

Mom and I found this while going through my bedroom back home. Inside we found an old silverware tray with a small handful of wire snippets and pieces of sheetmetal. I'm not sure what all I built from this set, but I think some of it was pretty cool.

The Floor Diaries, Part IV

Monday 1140 hours

At last the underlying floor is revealed. It's mostly hardwood under there, which is what we hoped. But it's in pretty bad shape. Paint smudges everywhere, weird shims made out of what appear to be roof shingles, termite damage, mysterious cuts, patches made from unfinished, mismatched boards. The contractor guys are dismayed at best. They say we really need to take out this floor, and fix the subfloor, and then put a new hardwood floor on top of it. Oh, and the reasonably nice hardwood floor in the kitchen was put down directly on top of this kind of old hardwood, which is Not Done anymore. But maybe we can just ignore that for now.

Big glue patch from the font door. It appears they used to have tile right under the front door. Why they heck didn't they preserve that tile when they put in the carpet?

Why is there a deep curved slot cut into the floor underneath the carpet? Bandsaw practice? Slot cars?

I'm the next room when I hear Don say, "OK, now THAT's a problem". I come out to see that he's found this power wiring underneath the carpet with a big nail driven right through it. Is it live? Is it safe? Hmmmmm.

We expected to some evidence under the carpet of where the old room boundaries were before the house was expanded. We had hoped they did something tidier than this, but that was probably overly optimistic.

The Floor Diaries, Part III

Monday 1140 hours.

Well, the carpet is pretty much gone, and they're starting to remove the pad. We're already pessimistic about what we'll find underneath, but at least the yucky old carpet is gone, gone, gone.

The Floor Diaries, Part II

Monday 0001 hours.

I waited until the last minute, then finally packed up the stereo. We strapped the Roll-or-Kari to the Hammond and moved it to the middle of the room. It's not all done, but we're going to need help with the remaining items. Off to bed...

The Floor Diaries, Part I

Sunday, 1700 hours.

We've just finished the Christmas Party. The last of the guests got to help me move the sofa into the garage. Pete delivered the loaner Roll-or-Kari that will make moving the Hammond tractable (God bless Pete!) Things are going pretty well, but we're fading fast.

Bosque del Apache, Day Three

Sandhill Crane
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

Well, Day Three featured better weather than day two, although still bitterly cold. We had a great time at some of the now familiar sites on the refuge, as well as a great trip to a pond on the New Mexico Tech campus featuring a very approachable flock of American Wigeon. What a trip!

Bosque del Apache, Day Two (noon)

Well, we're hiding in the hotel from a brutal 40mph wind, doing an impromptu Photoshop lesson. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Bosque del Apache, Day One

Snow Goose
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

w00t! Bosque del Apache, day one. I shot over 600 pictures today, and managed to delete over 100 of them during lunch and dinner. There will be some keepers, including this landing goose. The sunrise and sunset light was outstanding. I'm really learning a lot on this trip about how prevailing winds influence landing direction, how to set manual exposure for flight shots, and which tripod heads to buy.

Bosque del Apache, Day Zero

Hi all,

Greetings from sunny New Mexico. We've had our opening night slideshow from our instructor, now it's an early bedtime, a _very_ early alarm clock, and our first sunrise with the geese and cranes. We're very excited!

-Bill

Pumpkins

Pumpkins
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

I just wanted to show off the very diverse results of our Halloween pumpkin carving party. We managed to make a wolf, a cat, a Wallace, and a TROGDOR. And some very tasty roasted pumpkin seeds.

The 2006 calendar is done!

The 2006 wild birds calendar is done! I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Mary, Dan, Grant, John, Paul, and John for critique, advice, and encouragement. I'll be making more announcements about where to buy these in the SF bay area, but meanwhile you can order them on-line from my cafepress.com store.

We're going to New Mexico!

I have finally summoned the courage to sign up for Arthur Morris's bird photography class at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. I've heard he (pictured at left) is a great teacher. I've enjoyed his books and email newsletters.

So, this trip will mean many firsts -- first birding in New Mexico, first time travelling by plane with my enormous 500mm lens, first time shooting bird photos for three straight days.

Two Gentlemen of Verona preview this Saturday

Hi folks,

I'd like to invite you to the church this Saturday for some free theatre! A friend and I have been composing incidental music for this show, and I can honestly say the actors are fabulous. The director has done a great job of trimming the play down to an hour and making it kid-friendly. Thanks very much to University Church for letting us use its sanctuary. I hope you'll join us!


The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival presents:
Shakespeare On Tour's production of

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

- Saturday, October 15th, 2005, 2:30-3:30pm
- Free, Family friendly show, All ages welcome!
- Post-show discussion with the cast plus juice and cookies

Come join us this Saturday at the Church
1611 Stanford Avenue, Palo Alto, 650 758-9660


for more info about the show:
http://www.sfshakes.org/tour/index.html

Yosemite Fall Weekend

Yosemite
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

We had really enjoyed the mountains during a weekend at Yosemite for our friend's wedding. I spent some time on landscape photography, and even processed some of them in black and white. It's a stunning valley, and trying to capture it with a photograph is _so_ hard.

Late Sunday night we found a movie at the visitor's center about the career and working style of Ansel Adams, who knew a thing or two about photographing Yosemite valley. What I didn't know is that he trained hard to be a pianist, and judging by his playing in this film, he would have been a darn good one.

In processing the photos from the trip, I had one or two moments where I thought the black and white image looked righht, and those were electric moments. Perhaps that feeling was what kept him going, too.