I got up around my normal time and made instant coffee to go. J wanted to stay in the RV this morning, so I left by myself around 6:50.

I had Clif Bars for breakfast as I headed up Mt. Evans. I stopped and tried to photograph some uncooperative Yellow-Bellied Marmots and then stopped to photograph the near-full moon setting over Summit Lake. The images weren't too exciting with the clear blue sky and not many wildflowers around the lake.

I stopped where we had photographed marmots and pikas three days ago, and was able to get some nice portraits of an American Pika (below left). As I was about to leave, I saw a Mountain Goat nanny with a kid just up the hill, so I hiked up to get on their level. They were mostly busy grazing and didn't do very much that was photogenic. However, the kid laid down among some Mountain Aven which was nice (below right).


I returned to the RV around 10:30 and downloaded the images I took. Then I downselected them in iView and started to work on a blog entry. We packed up our computers and left in the Jeep around noon.

We went to Mangia! in Idaho Springs for lunch. I had Pesto Chicken and J had Pasta Fagoli and a Mangia! Signature Salad. The food was good as always, and it was fun to watch the people walking up and down Miner Street.

We went to McDonald's in Idaho Springs around 1:20 to use their fast Wi-Fi. I finished the blog entry and took it live. Then I uploaded the images for my stock submission while downselecting the images from this morning in Capture One (C1). We left around 4:05.

We went to the Safeway in town to grocery shop then went to the Kum & Go gas station to fill up the Jeep at $2.639/gal.

We returned to the RV around 4:55.

We had dinner around 5:15 of a Wanchai Ferry Orange Chicken bag meal that was tasty.

We left around 5:55 in the Jeep and headed up Mt. Evans.

We stopped just above the Mt. Goliath Natural Area to photograph the wildflowers. We could see the Old Man of the Mountain blooming from the road, and I was particularly interested in photographing them. I particularly liked the one in the image to the far left because of the "cracks" between the bracts. My favorite image is of a Parry's Primrose (near left). The shallow depth of field really helps the flowers stick out from the background, and I like the out-of-focus stalk and other blooms at the bottom. I also photographed Bluebell, Stemless Hymenoxys, and Diamond-Leaf Saxifrage. We had a ball and want to go back.
We returned to the RV around 8:00. I downselected the images from the evening and downselected them in Capture One (C1).

Addendum: Photoshop CS5

While processing images two days ago for the stock submission, I came across an image in a TIFF file that could use some noise reduction. As you might recall, Noise Ninja hasn't been updated to run with Photoshop CS5 yet, and I didn't have convenient access to the RAW file so I could process it again through Capture One (C1) with noise reduction. So, I opened up the TIFF file in Capture RAW and applied noise reduction to it that way. It worked fine, but next time I'll be ready and make a copy of the TIFF file first so that it will have a different name so that I can easily open up the original TIFF and the noise-reduced TIFF in Photoshop.

I've also gotten used to the File > File Info... (Exif) window. I had complained about it not remembering recent Document Titles, but it does in fact remember them. Instead of the popup menu like in CS3, it does auto-fill when you start typing. The Description field also does auto-fill, and this is an improvement over the old system because it auto-fills the whole field, whereas CS3 would only let you select one set of text between commas from a popup menu.