Brown Bear

Brown Bear On New Home Page

Photo of a brown bear wet from a month of rain.
After a month of non-stop rain, this brown bear longs for a dry day in Lake Clark National Park.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been working on an upgrade of my website.   This bear is on the new home page.

The upgrade consists mainly of making the images larger, roughly three times larger.  Converting the images has been taking longer than I like so I’ve decided to go “live” with the new site even though it isn’t finished.   I’ve completed the upgrade on the bird portfolios.  I’ve also done all or part of some of the mammal portfolios.  Because the images are much larger, I’ve been putting my copyright on them.  Images that don’t have my copyright haven’t been upgraded yet.  (They also look less than ideal because they’ve been “stretched” three times their original size.)  Hopefully, I’ll finish the upgrade in the near future.

In addition to larger images, the site is more user-friendly.  When you select and open a portfolio you now have a new way to view the images. You can simply use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard.  That wasn’t an option before.  You can also click on the arrows on the bottom of the portfolio (like before) or you can click on “slideshow” (also like before) or you can click on “thumbnails.”  If you do the latter you can navigate through them by clicking on the vertical bars at each end of the thumbnails to go four thumbnails backward or forward with each click.   The old site also had thumbnails, but they were of the scrolling variety which made them hard to control.  They were also much smaller.  These thumbnails can save a lot of time if you’re looking for a particular type of image.  As before, you can read something about each image by clicking on “image info” at the bottom of each image.

I think the site is a nice improvement over the old site.  I’d love to hear what you think.  To get to the new site you can get the link by clicking on “Portfolio” at the top of this blog or you can simply click here.

Tule Elk

A Lot of Bull, Point Reyes National Seashore

Photo of a tule elk bull at end of rut.
Bull Tule Elk

The day I photographed the peregrine (my last post) I also saw this big 7×8 point bull.  He was with about 40 cows and calves a short distance west of the Drake’s Beach Road.  I don’t like the background, but I think the size of this bull warrants a posting.

My postings have slowed down recently because I decided a month or so ago to make the images on my website much larger and it is taking a lot of time.  When I started I thought I’d use one or more actions to speed up the process.  However, as I assessed what was ahead of me I came to the conclusion that my Photoshop skills had improved enough that I could improve most of the images if I went back to the background layer of each image.  It’s going to take a few more weeks to get the revised site up, but I think it will be well worth the extra time.

Hawk

Peregrine Falcon, Point Reyes National Seashore

Photo of peregrine falcon eating its prey.
Peregrine Falcon Holding Its Prey

I went out to Point Reyes yesterday for the first time since I left for Yellowstone in early September.  I’m still trying to get some good images of elk during the rut.  Thanks to heavy fog around Pierce Point, I didn’t have much luck in that regard.  I was lucky, though, to spot this peregrine feeding on some prey while perched on a fence post.