One of the good things about getting enough rain to wash out most of a holiday weekend is it gives you a chance to catch up with a lot of things.

We bought a new Asus laptop to work on our images. 17 inch monitor with 8 gigs of RAM and 1 terrabyte hard drive. It has a NVIDIA graphics card geared for gamers but it works pretty good for still images. When they call a laptop a desktop replacement…it is code for its heavier than sin. This thing is a load but it runs everything with no hiccups

I finally got the new laptop loaded with all the software. This included CS6 and all the updates for Noiseware,Acrobat and BreezeBrowser and Downloader Pro. From installing all this software stuff, I learned to write down every serial number,authorization number or any thing that might possibly allow you to load your programs to a new computer.Waaaaaaaaaay to many passwords and authorization numbers. Next time, I may try the network wired  method.

Went out today to just get out of the house and maybe get an image or two. Went to the sunflower field to see if they had mowed it for dove season. The field was still up but the dove hunters were out so— no goldfinches and from my conversation with the hunters– no doves either. Continued into Confluence State Park– not much going on but Molly had me pull over and she took some nice backlit images of sunflowers.

Ran into Kathy O’Donnell at the Heron Pond. Molly and I had a nice conversation with her. We all agreed that we were looking forward to seeing the great photography that the St. Louis Camera Club is known for both nationally and internationally. One of the best parts of the first camera club meeting is seeing all the folks that you don’t see over the summer recess as well as seeing the folks that we run into nearly every weekend  while photographing along the Mississippi River.

Saw a goodly number of shorebirds– now the challenge is how to photograph them without running afoul of the “stay on the path directive”.

Heavy rain swept in and the ride home was extremely wet.

All shorebirds images were taken from the Heron Pond parking lot…and cropped. 🙂