Herons are a big subject, and today we’ll start with the biggest heron of all – the Great Blue Heron. Largest of the North American herons, and seemingly the most plentiful, these graceful giants can be found almost anywhere there is a shore, pond, lake, or marsh. They seem to be as comfortable near cities and people as they are in the most remote wilderness, and that opens up a host of possibilities – for the watchful photographer!
I’ve found that Great Blue Herons that live in close contact with people tend to be less skittish, and you can get a lot closer. You can observe them in their natural behaviors of feeding, courting, nesting and preening – with far less frustration if you only choose city birds over country birds!
Now, you might say, “that’s cheating!” But, I’d respond that a majority of the best photographs I have of Great Blues were taken in areas close to civilization. And conversely, the photos I’ve taken of these birds in the wilderness tend to be from farther away, with less candid and spontaneous poses.
So, without further ado, let’s explore the world of the Great Blue Heron…

This week, as I’ve compiled my list of updates to popular software packages – in the interest of keeping everyone informed and current to prevent security problems – we have quite a list of changes. Microsoft released their monthly “patch Tuesday” fixes last week, and on top of that we’ve seen browser security patches in Safari and Google Chrome; and we’ve seen WordPress get another security patch as well.
We’ve seen that Adobe Bridge is a very powerful tool for managing many types of files, but with Creative Suite documents, and Camera Raw files, the Bridge is outstanding. This power comes at a cost in terms of system loading, though, and Adobe’s developers realized that not all systems are state of the art, blazing fast systems with unlimited memory. For that reason, they have added some ability to control Bridge’s on-the-fly performance and throttle back some of the processing power demanded, for those occasions when your system (or your patience) just isn’t up to it. One of the ways this is done is by controlling the display of thumbnails in the Content window.
As a teenager in the Boy Scouts, I had several opportunities to attend summer camp at Central Florida’s McGregor Smith Scout Reservation, one of Florida’s hidden gems (since acquired and operated by the 



