Yes, upgrade time again! The previous upgrade from Lightroom 3 to 4 was focused on image optimization, with a completely new and pivotal process version (2012), whereas the latest upgrade is all about speeding up your workflow.   Yes!!    The new tools, including improvements in the Develop module, work faster and better, allowing you to do even more in LR5 without the need for editing in Photoshop – a real time & image saver.               Here are my favorite 5 features in LR5:

Four weekends now and heading into the fifth, where on earth does time go?  Perhaps my window-less underground English dungeon of an office provides some of the answer – 850GB, or approximately 27,000 images, ruthlessly Bridged to a scant 3,600 and efficiently run through my workflow.   And what of the bonus of Lightroom 5?  Stay with me and I may get there. But it hasn’t all been work and no play ...

OK, I know it has been a while since I have blogged, but life and work have been rather hectic over the past few months.   However, UK immigration looked favorably on me last week and I now reside in an underground windowless office in Cheltenham, England shackled to a 27inch screen with my Terabytes of un-Bridged images – I thought I was coming for a holiday!  I am told I will be allowed out for the weekend!! So, it is obviously time to rectify my silence, and here are a whole bunch of small items to bring you up to date:

Yellowstone, the world’s first National Park, and its ecosystem are at a watershed.  How they will both be managed in the face of multiple stressors and rapidly changing attitudes is unclear, but a new book has just been published which looks at these conflicts.  With a large MSU footprint, ‘Yellowstone’s Wildlife in Transition’ is illustrated entirely with my photographs, and brings together the expertise of more than 30 contributors with a forward by the famed naturalist Edward O. Wilson.

avec Cindy Goeddel et Sacha Bollet!              I know, I know!  I’m sorry!!  Yes, I have promised to Blog on a couple of occasions in the last month, but you know how it is …… tours to lead, dogs to feed, exams to take, cookies to bake, classes to teach, clients to reach, a muse to please, poetry to …… Hang on, wait a minute!  Something’s amiss here, obviously been working too hard!

For the 4th year, Audubon Magazine has run its annual photography awards, and I am so pleased that one of my images of a red-naped sapsucker has been selected for the Top 100 out of the 9,361 photos submitted.

It's that time of the year again - the season of joy, peace and panic.   However, this year Santa very kindly sent me a little helper to toil in the workshop, wrapping presents and stamping those pesky hordes of envelopes.  He is out clearing the snow at the moment!   I am due to write a blog, but I just finished finals and I have my CPR Certificate to renew and Lightroom handouts to revise, and lots of other pressing tasks, so I have stolen the latest blog from the little helper's website.  This guest blogger idea isn’t a bad one!  Apparently, his trip from the North Pole wasn't as smooth as it might have been, Santa didn't lay on a private sled!  So here it is, the joys of travel …….

OK!  This is a long one.  The weather in the UK is so darn awful, I have lots of indoor time!  So, prepare for an even more European Blog than you might have expected!

I am at it again, advertising for Montana Magazine - and me too - but then it does have a great Cover Photograph this month!  

September is a busy time for photographers and creatures alike.  Having just finished my Fall season tours for the year, I thought I'd share some thoughts and observations ...