85F in the shade … Perfect, my favorite temperature.  A warm breeze with flocks of cotton from the trees lazily floating by me, uniformly heading upstream only to reverse direction in mass confusion, as if the wind cannot decide where best to deposit the fluff.  I am in the Cederberg Mountain Range, a three-hour drive from Cape Town.

Reluctantly, I left my bulkier Wimberly head and tall legs at home opting for the more compact ball head and legs.  Of course, photographing new and fantastic birds in the Cape Peninsula, I realized it had been a mistake.  I made a promise that next time I would bring both and ditch something else.

Cape Town, a stunning, diverse and intriguing city.   How could anyone resist the allure of two oceans, endless coastline, moody mountains, intoxicating wine-lands and the smallest, but richest floral kingdom on earth?  I’ve been here just over a week and am already emotionally joined to this tiny sliver of land on the South Western tip of Africa.

It probably isn't for me to provide a commentary on our dysfuntional, demoralizing democracy - or rather our dysfunctional, demoralizing and self-serving politicians, but what about the National interest?

Yellowstone is closed!   The World’s first ever National Park is off-limits to that World!

  Adobe has announced a new $9.99 per month Creative Cloud bundle for photographers.

OK, I’m back and straight into the thick of guiding photographers in Yellowstone.  It’s great to be back in Montana and The Park - the noisy and dusty Bison Rut continues, the bugling of the Elk Rut is echoing through the valleys, the crowds are thinning and the Fall colors are beginning to develop.  However, before I am absorbed into the ever-changing miracle of Yellowstone, I thought I ought to tell you about the final few days of my stay in the UK.

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: