By Brian Doherty

With a few chilly nights and daylight hours getting shorter, this week really felt like fall for a change.

Other signs of fall we saw this past week were the last trickle of Butterflies closing out one of the best Monarch migrations in more than 10 years.

We also had  the return of multiple Humpback whales along our western south shore to gorge themselves on Menhaden.  You can also see the fall colors in the background of many of this week’s images.

This week’s cover photo goes to Tony Fanni with a nice shot of a Greater Yellowlegs in action.

Photo Tip:

Many of you take a lot of photos in order to find some  “keepers”, below  I decided to add a few workflow tips to managing your photos that might be useful.

One of my keys to Wildlife photography is constantly refocusing between shots using back-button focusing and taking lots and lots of photos. I typically take 800 – 2000 photos each day I go out. My rate of keeper shots is about 10% for Birds in Flight (BIF) and 30% for non-BIF. Because I take so many photos, I came up with the below workflow of managing the thousands of images I process each week.

 

  1. Download Images – I import my photos to my Lightroom (LR) Library on a 15″ MacBook pro with 500GB SSD; I use a Lexus Card Reader as that is faster than wired to the Camera.
  2. Throw away the bad images – In LR, I quickly preview the photos for crispness and composition and Rate each with 1-3 Stars in the first pass. Any photo without a Star is Deleted.
  3. Edit the good images – In LR, I Edit (Develop) the photos and when done I Export to a Folder “Pictures\Exports”. I set up LR so my Exports append Date (mmddyyyy) to my filenames. After Exporting I mark that photo with 5 Stars so I know this was already exported and is a keeper.
  4. Back up image files – Once I have completed Editing a bunch of photos I back up the finished JPGs and the Raw files to a 1 Terabyte external hard drive. I also upload my finished JPGs to Amazon Prime Photos (unlimited photo storage if you have Amazon Prime and has great indexing and search capabilities and a great mobile app).
  5. Format the Card – I return my Flash or SD card to the Camera and Format which deletes all images so I am all ready to go out shooting again.
  6. Back up the back up – I have a second 1 Terabyte external hard drive that I keep at work. I bring this home periodically and sync with the 1 Terabyte external hard drive at home and return to work. This is a bit overkill but ensures you will not lose everything if there is a disaster at home or a work. This also protects you if your external hard drive fails which is rare but does happen.
  7. Freeing up space – Once my Raw files are backed up on 2 separate external hard drives, I delete those files from my MacBook hard-drive.

 

Belted kingfisher | Jason Ganz

Black-Crowned Night Heron | Cindy Goldman

Buff-Breasted Sandpiper | Len Maltese

Cooper’s Hawk | Heff Stoppe

Box Turtle | Alex Roukis

Greater Yellowlegs | Tony Fanni

More photos on pages 2, 3, 4 and 5!