Author: Dan Cordell

British Virgin Islands 2015 Trip – Part 1

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“Hold the flight, there’s 15 more behind me coming!” I yelled, out of breath after sprinting down the Miami terminal from my previous flight. Our flight from St. Thomas had gotten in on time, but a jet with mechanical problems was stuck in our original gate, and we’d had to wait for the new gate–only a few doors down from our connecting flight to Seattle–to be available. It turned our 45 minute connection into less than 5 minutes.

But I should back up to the beginning of the trip if I’m going to tell this correctly.

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It’s real pretty here

Here’s the view from my boat today, the 50′ catamaran Freedom Seeker.

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Needless to say, we’re having a wonderful time. We’ve been snorkeling and enjoying the sunshine here at Cooper Island all day, and we’re headed to Spanish Town on Virgin Gorda tomorrow.

(unrealiable WiFi means this is being posted the day after it was taken)

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Oh Lightroom, how I’ve missed you

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Adobe’s Lightroom 6 was released this week, bearing with it support for various new camera models including my Nikon D7200. What a relief! Nikon’s Capture NX-D software is terrible and slow, so despite some online purchasing difficulty with Adobe, everything is back up and running.

Thus, I’ve gone back through the last several weeks of D7200 photos with a culling and editing pass. I’m only partway through and have found a number of photos I’d passed over in Capture NX-D.

Female Red-breasted Nuthatch

Female Red-breasted Nuthatch

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Meadowbrook Pond, Seattle

I spent a short time this morning at Meadowbrook Park, a small wildlife sanctuary in the middle of a residential Seattle neighborhood. There were numerous house and song sparrows, Anna’s hummingbirds, a few various species of duck, red-winged blackbirds, and a couple of blue herons.

Didn’t get many pictures I particularly liked this morning, but made up for quantity with quality in two I’m very happy with.

Great blue heron headshot

Great blue heron headshot

Song sparrow close-up

Song sparrow close-up

Also: It’s less than two weeks until I’m in the British Virgin Islands on a 44′ sailing catamaran (that I’m the captain of!) and I couldn’t be more excited.

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New camera body, unpredictable weather, and waiting on Adobe

No gallery post from this last weekend: the weather report was opposite of what was predicted, so my booked-up Saturday turned out to be beautiful and the predicted-partly-sunny-Sunday turned out to be gray and rainy the entire day. That said, I had time to play indoors (with my parrots as subjects) with the new Nikon D7200 that was released (and which I bought from Glazer’s Camera) on Thursday the 19th.

It’s a huge upgrade from my D3200, particularly in terms of high ISO and autofocus, as well as configurability, so I’m still learning my way around it. Unfortunately, it’s also so new that Adobe doesn’t yet support the RAW files with their Adobe Camera RAW support. This means that I’m stuck using Nikon’s awful Capture NX-D software to edit the RAW files until Adobe releases an update to handle the D7200, so I’m avoiding doing much editing for now, instead just culling things not worth editing and doing what I can with a few of my favorite shots. Once Adobe does another release, I’ll be going over several weeks (hopefully not months!) of shots and I’ll post my favorites here.

Instead, here’s one from this weekend that I really liked, and you can see a few others over on my Instagram account.

Auri is my ~8 year old lilac-crowned amazon

Auri