Movin' on to Spring Next Week

Hard to believe, but the spring equinox is March 20 - that's Tuesday next week. I love the rush of life that happens in the spring.

In Bear Creek Park in Surrey, during one of our brief sunny breaks this week, I caught these crocuses coming up among the dead leaves from last year. It's a busy photo, but it a way, it makes a statement about the seasons we know and love: all things rest and then begin anew.

Here's one more to herald the coming spring.

Escape from Skyrim and back to work

RPG Xbox games are not usually my cup of tea. I much prefer first person shooters to role playing games. However, on recommendation from a 'friend', I updated to the new Xbox and picked up a copy of the Skyrim game in early February.

Hmmmm…from the (lack of) posts over the last month or so, we can see what happened after that! Quests and bandits and dragons can be quite addicting….thank you 'friend' ;-)

But in the end, all's good. Along with some business networking in February, I popped out to the local parks when the sun poked out. More walkabouts and playing with the camera than any serious photography.

Early this month, I got out to Delta and to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary to see if I could see their Sandhill Cranes. Lots of ducks, coots, geese and pintails, but no cranes for me this time.

On the way back home, I stopped on the dike near the Delta Airport and got some photos of a couple of Snowy Owls nestled amongst the logs on the beach. To find them, all I had to do is look along the dike and spot the bevy of other photographers with their half-meter lenses looking seaward. Heh, it does get to be quite a show.

Over all it was an interesting day, and I learned how much more I need to learn about long lens photography. This Snowy Owl shot was done with my Sigma 120-400 lens on the Nikon D300. I used a Manfrotto ball head and tripod under the lens, but should have used a remote shutter release as well.  The exif data should be accessible from the photo on Flickr, along with some other shots from the day.

Starting to Network Again

I'm trying to get out more to socialize with the local business community. After close to a year of being layed up and out of the loop, I'm finding it harder to catch up and keep up with what's going on.

At an Surrey Board of Trade (SBoT) Business to Business networking event on Thursday night, some people I met suggested I come to their morning networking breakfast at the Kalmar Restaurant on King George Boulevard in Surrey. There was no commitment expected, other that to see how it went.

About 20 people made it out to that event on Friday morning, some of whom I've known from SBoT and others from different times, or from other events around town. It was good to catch up over a nice breakfast and learn more about what all those people are, and have been up to.

According to the Meetup page for the group, the Surrey Langley Business Support Network, there are a lot more than 20 members, so I guess, like with other organizations, the number that attends individual events can vary a lot.

That's good. More people means more stories over time, and that keeps things interesting. Also, if too many people show up, the organization might have to move from the intimacy of a restaurant to some bigger venue at a lot more cost.

It was nice to get out and socialize on a Friday morning. It was also a good excuse to pack up some camera gear and get out to take some pictures after the event.

Going to have to do more of that.

The Eagles Have Landed in Delta

I caught this bad boy in a tree over near Boundary Bay Airport. A buddy of mine has been making the trek from North Delta over to the Delta Hospital in South Delta for the last couple of weeks and mentioned that the eagles were back on the flats.

I was out late last year and earlier this year, looking to see if they were around, but I guess I was too early. The big birds are sure out there now.

In one area around the airport, there were at least 5 trees with a minimum of 5 eagles sitting on their branches. Some of the farmer's fields are full of gulls and the eagles are joining them to feed on something. Not sure what it could be, other than some rodents, or perhaps older gulls.

Anyway, the eagles are all over the place and seem quite tolerant to people right now. Usually they are pretty skittish, but this fellow was in the middle of a off-leash dog park, so he's probably use to people and dogs running around under his tree.

Fighting That 'Mushroom' Feeling

In a sense, I've been feeling like a bit of a mushroom lately. In the dark, getting fed nothing but…. Well, you know the story. This time of year is like that on the wet coast. The days largely are short, dark and wet.

However, a bit of respite today. In a fit of energy and patience, I spent several hours going through the many storage discs where I've squirrelled away photos over the last 6 years or more. Some of it was before I had any idea about the number of images I'd be managing, so it was pretty random in terms of file type, folder names, location, etc.

It was just time to get to it and pull it all together.

Now, most of the photos are managed by year and folder, the folder having a date and a name that tells me a where the photos were taken. An example would be "12-01-23 Green Timbers" for photos taken today at Green Timbers Park. Well, it would be if I had taken any photos today ;-) But you get the idea.

The one problem I haven't solved is the overlapping file names. With multiple cameras all using the same naming system, I'm bound to get into a situation where I try to bring two of them together with the same name, like _DWS2952. But, we'll deal with that when we come to it. So far, so good.

After all the work today, my photos are organized and stored both on my iMac and on a Drobo external drive. I also have an Apple Time Machine backup to a Time Capsule and another overnight copy of the iMac made to an iOmega drive. I just have to arrange one more thing, and that's an offsite storage drive for the whole thing.

Bottom line: I have 4 copies of my photos at home, and those are in danger of being all taken out at once by fire. That last copy offsite is critical, but I'm loath to spend a fortune for cloud storage right now. A physical arrangement will have to do - perhaps rotating drives to a safe deposit box or something.

Ah, the joys of digital data. At least it's cheap to make copies.