Everything is Permuted

The persistent rain of the day finally cleared away during this evening. I'm ever hopeful of seeing the foxes, but so far tonight they've stayed away. Instead here are a few photos of one of the garden newts. It was out hunting, taking advantage of the damp and mild conditions.


After the first shot I managed to find a better angle







Camera note: all shots taken with the Canon 7D and EF 100mm f/2.8L macro IS USM lens.

No great theme today, just a few photos starting with a rather fine looking mallard.




Next up is a goose... one of the locals.


And a second goose (a local greylag). The white goose is essentially a domesticated (now feral) greylag.


The final bird photo is of a much smaller species, the pied wagtail. This one was busy catching flies on the church roof.


No foxes this evening, but a couple of pond-life shots. A young newt, and then a damselfly nymph.




I'm currently in the middle of learning my way around Adobe Lightroom (using a 30-day trial version). It's in parts baffling (I get lost just moving around it), but the raw processing is excellent, as are the range of editing tools. I'll persist with the learning curve as I strongly suspect that once I have got a proper idea of how to use it I'll save a lot of time sitting in front of the computer. All today's shots were edited in it apart from final re-sizing and sharpening in Photoshop (which really does take only a few seconds). Being able to do fairly sophisticated edits (certainly when compared with Canon's Digital Photo Pro) is a big step forward and I only need to process shots I know I'm going to use. It also has some excellent tagging tools which should help in keeping track of images.


Camera note: all birds taken with the Canon 7D and EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L USM IS lens. The newt and nymph were photographed with the EF 100mm f/2.8L macro IS USM lens.

Just a very few photos tonight. I've spent much of the day configuring my Windows 7 set-up. Yes, the installation went very smoothly but there's all the applications to reinstall and reconfigure to behave how I like them (which is rarely how the designers default them). I'm most of the way there! Missing having a 'quick launch' task bar (W7 is massively wasteful of lateral taskbar space, even with icons at their smallest) but other than that I can see the benefits in terms of speed of boot-up. Edit: Thanks to Darko for pointing me in the direction of 'quick launch' which I've now set up with all my frequently used applications, while saving about 50% of taskbar space.

So anyway, all that meant little time for taking photos until this evening, which in turn means that the camera turned to the pond. And found....

a frog resting under the surface....


and another poking its head out to say hello.


Countless damselfly nymphs...






This last one is a bit of a cheat. It's a photo from Friday night, but I can assure you I did see several young newts tonight as well. I just prefer this shot.



Camera note: all shots taken with the Canon 7D and EF 100mm f/2.8L macro IS USM lens.