Boolie’s Blog

Another barn swallow picture from two months ago, the male brought in some building material (this time, sans mud).

Adobe just released an updated version of their raw file converter, with some new options for color profiles. I’m playing around with a few new and older images like this one to test out the changes. So far I like what I see.

The bigger news for me was the release of the second major version of Lightroom, which seems to address some of the problems that kept me from purchasing the first version. To test out the eval version, I’d like to sort and edit some images from Yellowstone in 2004 and 2005, which are ripe for a re-editing anyway.

It’s exciting to see how far the software tools have come since my first days of digital photography in December of 2000. It’s also exciting to see how far computers have evolved, the difference between my little MacBook and the desktop I was using back then is astonishing.

This is the same swallow as the one in the previous picture, as you can see from this picture he really isn’t as chubby as he appeared. He also might have had a little damage to his left wing, but it didn’t appear to impact his flight.

In the air, swallows have a sleek, aerodynamic shape designed for close maneuvering so they can catch insects in flight. You’d never know it from looking at this little puffball, with his feathers puffed out he gives a false impression of being rather plump. Many birds will do this when they are cold to create pockets of warm air, much like a hiker dressing in layers.

A male barn swallow with mud and plants in his beak as he builds a nest under a footbridge at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge.

A barn swallow takes a break from hunting insects over South Quigley Lake along Ridgefield’s auto tour and puffs itself out in the rain. In addition to the barn swallows, tree and cliff swallows were also on the wing.