As a former High School a College umpire you do not have that luxury, a quote from an umpire from the 40's said "They either is or they ain't". You do not have the ability to flip that coin, even in your head, you have to make the call and make it demonstratively positive and stand by it. One of the things I have really enjoyed is the replay in MLB it shows that the umpires are right a little more than 50% of the time in all calls challenged. In 2016 there were only 1279 challenges but think of all of the calls that were made by the umpires in that year. There are 2430+ games played each year with around 75 challengeable calls per game, or 182,250+ per year. That is only .7% of the calls made for the year, not bad for a game of inches. Umpires are human too, so cut them some slack. The total number of errors by the players in 2015 was 2829 so better than 4 times more errors by the players than overturned calls by the umpires.

I like the first one. The rock formations are much more interesting.

Oops, you are right. I had them listed in a directory called "Maine Lighthouses" and did not look at my images of the signs to tell me where they were. Please accept my profound apology to the New Hampshire residents. We stayed in a wonderful little town called Francestown in NH and it was a perfect central location to go to all of the sights in New England. One of the neat places in Francestown was the "Francestown Village Store" supposedly the 2nd oldest continuously running store in the US. It reminded me of my grandparents general store in a little town called Wolfdale in PA. The floors were wood the shelves were close together and there was everything you could think of in the way of merchandise, from pre-prepared foods, beers, wines to all of the things you would need to run a small farm. What a step back into my childhood it was wonderful.

Yes the Portsmouth LH allows that, you cannot get to the other LH.

I was wandering through my archives and found these. I had forgotten all about them, we had a wonderful trip and traveling around the New England states.

Cape Neddick Light Station, Nubble Lighthouse

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Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse

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I think it is a Tri-color Heron, or a lesser Blue Heron, too small for a GBH. He had lots of fry to chase, the next door neighbor puts out cracked corn for the ducks and throws Turtle Chow in the pond and the fry come up to nibble.

Black Bellied Whistling Duck

Had a wonderful surprise tonight. We usually only see one or two pairs of Black Bellied Whistling Ducks. Had a flock tonight. Past sunset tried the flash and did not scare them away. No PP on these ON1 software on office PC.

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As Duane states all mechanical or SSD storage can fail. I am the Director of It for a large Agricultural company and we back up to multiple types of storage D2D, Tape, CD and Offsite Cloud based systems. If you have limited availability to the "Cloud" then your best bet is a NAS system with at least RAID 5 capability that way if one drive fails it can rebuild on to the new drive. But do not put all of your hope on that because the device itself can also fail and then you are SOL. Backup to multiple devices or media for the best protection.

During the film era, I found the 1.8 85mm and the 1.8 135mm to be perfect for basketball and night football. I covered both of those for newspapers. I pushed Tri-X to ASA 1600, with the ability to set ISO on the 750 I think it would probably be even better with those lenses now.

As one of my favorite WTF sites (chive.com) says, "Gotta Find Me a Goofy Girl"! I am lucky enough to have found one and I can highly recommend it, your days are never boring.

Busy day this weekend for the birds on the pond. Always amazed on the diversity in such a little pond. As you can see mama duck has already lost 2 ducklings. The Wood Ducks surprised me, first time I have seen any on the pond. The Tri-color Heron was very busy feeding for 20 or 30 minutes but stayed away from me most of the time. I have got to work on my focus points, I think the water movement is driving the auto-focus crazy. I may have to get out my tripod and put a chair to sit on next to the water and let them get used to me sitting there.

Mama Duck less 2

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Wood Ducks

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Tri-Color Heron

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I have to agree with Mike. You will use the wide-angle to medium zoom the most but do not listen to the nay-sayers about a good 200mm+ tele for on the boat and an extender may be helpful. You usually travel down the middle channels and the river is wide enough that you will want to use it for the shoreline shots. I did the same trip you are doing and it was marvelous weather late July that there was very little haze and my tele shots came out very crisp and clear. You will be happy with the 24-70 for almost all of the shore excursions. As some one said crank up your ISO for the interior shots and you should be fine. The point and shoot is great for unobtrusive shots at some of the venues you will probably go to. Everyone is right about the tripod most of the sites are crowded and will be a pain to set up.

I used Tri-X as my standard film (newspaper photographer) no issue with it when you put through the halftone process to put it on an offset press. The grain just became part of the news print and the halftone dots. I learned early on if you processed it gently, D-76 at 68 degrees, only agitate once every minute and keep all of the other chemicals, stop bath and fixer at the same temperature, 68 degrees, I could get 24 x 36 prints with no discernible grain. But if you sent it to a lab they always processed it hot and boy did that grain pop! I always did my own development when I was working for my portfolio or outside clients. I used Agfa Brovira? (I guess they are gone now) paper for my stuff. Let the lab techs develop my news work and then I printed the photos myself, but used the paper the newspaper bought for their stuff Kodak RC (read cheap). I still have a lot of my B&W prints (early 70s & 80s) and it has held up well to the elements. I see some old prints that the labs did not do a good job of washing and you can see fixer stains and fading.

First signs that summer has arrived in central Florida. Sorry for the noise but it was late afternoon when I got home and first spotted them. Needed to crank up the ISO the get a reasonable shot.

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