New e-Book: Merced National Wildlife Refuge

6FPS V4#8: July 11, 2022

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

As you can tell from the title of this issue, I spent a part of my PTO time in the last month finishing production of the new e-book, which is now out. Merced National Wildlife Refuge is my seventh e-book, a number that surprised and amazes me, and I think it’s my best yet. I talk more about it below in the essay.

Also, just for 6FPS subscribers, check out my notes on the new e-book below for a chance to win a paper copy of the book!

Subscribers might notice that I’ve finally also spent the time refreshing the look of this newsletter. I think it’s a nice improvement, although there are one or two default design choices by SquareSpace’s system I’m not sure I love (mostly around line spacing, to be honest). I’ve wanted to do this for a while but hadn’t found the time, and it took me about two days of poking and prodding to get it into this new shape, which overall I’m pretty happy with.

A few goals of this refresh were to give it a cleaner look overall, and to include a bit more graphical/photography content in it, without bogging it down or bloating it’s size. I think I’ve found a good compromise that keeps the email size down but makes it a more interesting to view and easier to read.

I’d love your feedback on the changes, and what you like and don’t like.

There isn’t much different in one I put into each issue, with one exception: I’ve replaced the area showing off the Photo Wednesday/Feathery Friday images with a Recent Work area. To be honest, producing the collage of images every issue was one of the more time consuming aspects of creating the newsletter, and I thought it looks cluttered and really didn’t show off the images well. Other than that, it was perfect.

In the last couple of month’s, I’d started some small changes to my web site and refreshing the content and the design a bit, and as part of the release of the Merced e-book and the need to make changes there to support that, I spent a couple of days doing work on the site as well, as there were a few things I found annoying about my design. Those are now dead.

One thing I added was a Recent Work page which I update whenever I do a round of processing in Lightroom, and will always hold images taken or re-processed in the last 45 days or so. To replace that collage for the PW/FF stuff, I’m now including two images from Recent Work, and if they look interesting, you can click through and see all of the stuff I’ve been working on. The PW/FF weekly posts haven’t changed and are still available as well.

The New Sony

I’m loving the new Sony. I did end up buying a third lens, the Tamron 17-28 F2.8to give me the wide angle options, but I haven’t even taken it out of the box yet. I intend to replace the kit Sony 24-70, possibly with the Tamron 28-200, but I want to play with the kit lens a bit first before making a final decision.

I’ve also decided to accelerate my retirement of the Fuji gear; some of it went to Laurie and upgraded some of her older gear, and the rest will be going to KEH, since I trust their pricing and judging of gear to be fair and can avoid the fun and hassle of eBay and Craigslist that way. By nest issue I may well be an ex-Fuji user, and I’ll update my camera bag post to reflect that as soon as I sort out the details.

Birds and Birding

I have had a blast watching the birds come to the feeder; when I can’t get out and about, it’s been a great aspect of my self-care to watch and photograph the goings on here on the property. When we bought this place, we felt it would be good bird habitat and that we could work to make it better, but it’s gone beyond my wildest expectations. I’ve been tracking successful breeding here on the property, and as of when I write this, eleven species have brought chicks to the feeders or to some place where I could confirm they’ve fledged and left the nest.

In about a year here watching birds, I’ve seen or heard 62 species, which is one species less than I saw on the Santa Clara property across 15 years. On a typical day sitting and watching the feeders and staring into the sky looking for swallows and eagles, 15 species is a typical result. This is, for me, really awesome.

In terms of birding the county, I’m slowly learning which places are ones to re-visit, and I’m finally more or less caught up with what’s being seen around here. Every day eBird sends me a report known as a “needs list”, which documents the submitted sightings by others in the county. There are right now four or five species I can chase, but most of the reports for species I haven’t yet seen this year are on private property where it wouldn’t be something I could go after appropriately. So until fall migration hits, I can fill in the gaps (next chase: Eurasian Collared-Dove and Brewer’s Blackbird) but I no longer feel like I’m an idiot for going months without reporting a Canada Goose (which I actually had happen). I’m at 94 species for the year right now, which are all here in Kitsap, and that number feels low compared to previous years, but this county’s full list for the year is at 217 species, and since I was not getting out much during winter and parts of migration, I’m happy with my results.

Fall migration is coming, though…

New Wallpapers

I’ve released a new set of wallpaper images to the 6FPS Secret Subscriber web page. They include some images from up here in Washington, and some of the first images from the new Sony A7IV. Please download and enjoy!

More Stuff Coming

I’m hard at work producing e-book #8, which I expect to see out in the next month or two. It’s less photography, more essay, and another thing I’ve been working on slowly since before the move, and so far, I’m happy how it’s shaping up. The last of the essays is now written and I’m now starting design and layout.

And with that, see you next issue!

What's New from Chuq?

New e-Book: Merced National Wildlife Refuge

Since last issue I’ve released a new E-book about Merced National Wildlife Refuge. This book contains my thoughts and images from 15 years of visiting and studying this key bird habitat in California’s Central Valley. Home to many tens of thousands of migrating birds in the winter, Merced NWR is an important part of the Pacific Flyway.

As I write this, I just got the blurb hardcover edition that I make for myself and I love how it came out. I think it’s my best release yet, both in terms of the writing and the photos and how I laid it out. In some ways it closes a chapter in my life getting this book out the door, since Merced is now far enough away I have to plan a trip to visit, but I hope to do so in the next year or two, and until then, I think I’ve done a nice job here showing why I fell in love with the place.

I’ve changed up how I publish this as well. I still write the book and publish it as a hard-bound book by Blurb for my personal collection, because one of the reasons I started doing this was so I could put my photography into a permanent form. In the past, I not only did a PDF version to share with everyone, but I also did tablet and kindle editions. I’ve found almost nobody uses those, so I only created and produced the PDF this time.

In thinking of ways to widen the potential audience, I spent some time looking at doing a video version of the book, but I’ve ultimately decided that I’m not really a video kind of person and I have too many other priorities to put the time into figuring out how to do videos well, so that’s all been back-burnered (again. for now). But I realized there was no reason not to produce the e-book for the web as well and publish it on my site, and so that’s what I did. The text and images are the same, but the layout is slightly different between the two to work with the design strengths and weaknesses of both forms.

I intend to do this online/blurb co-production for books moving forward. I would love to hear what you think about these new online editions, since I think that’s a direction I’m going to go in the future as I publish new books (and book 8 is well on its way and should be available in a month or two).

You can learn more about this book in the blog post I wrote about the release, download the PDF version, or view the e-book online edition as you prefer.

I’m giving away copies of this book!

For the first time, I’ve printed up some spare copies, and I have a few copies I plan to give away to 6FPS subscribers. Here’s how this works:

  • Send an email, to chuqvr@gmail.com with the title “book giveaway”, and let me know you’d like a copy of the book.

  • The email must come from the email address subscribed to 6FPS.

  • If you are selected, I’ll reach out to you for an address to ship this to. I will mail them worldwide at no cost to you.

I have 4-6 copies of the book to give away. Whoever’s email arrives first will get a copy. For the rest, I’ll collect all of the requests and select people using random.org to figure out who gets the copies.

I’ve wanted to do this for a while, but the cost of producing a printed copy of the book always cost way more than I was willing to spend to make more copies than the one I do for myself — this e-book cost me > $150US at Blurb since I used large, upgraded paper for it.

I realized while thinking about this that I could take the book project file and duplicate it, and then change the printing parameters and print it again in a lower cost format. It took me less than an hour to reformat the pages to fit a smaller page size, and by printing as softcover with standard paper, I got the cost for a small batch of them down under $30 a book — which made this something well worth doing. Some of the batch are going to friends and mentors, and the rest to you, my loyal subscribers.

I will likely do this for future e-books as well, depending on the level of interest I see on this giveaway.

Recent Photography

As I create new images and re-process older ones, I post them on my site in the Recent Work area. Additionally, every Wednesday is Photo Wednesday on the blog, where I post one of my non-bird images, and the bird images are posted on the blog each week as part of Feathery Friday. Here are a couple of images I am really happy with that are new to Recent Work

For Your Consideration

Photography

Birds and Birding

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

Recommendations

Dan Moren’s new book is The Nova Incident: The Galactic Cold War Book III, his fourth book in his Galactic Cold War universe. This one is a fast paced, often frenetic, adventure as his crew of spies find themselves investigating an incident that may or may not tie back into the highest levels of the organization they also work for.

Fast paced, fun reading and a great piece of mind candy that doesn’t require a lot of thought along the way, but holds together well in terms of the plot.

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire is the fifth book in the Waward Children series, a series of stories loosely (very) around well-known fairy tales about children who are born into the wrong place and time, and sometimes find a door that allows them to cross over into a different reality, which isn’t necessarily a happy ending.

This book returns to tie up loose ends with Jack and Jill, who when last we saw them Jack was carrying off the body of his murdered sister. This book opens with Jack returning to the Eleanor West's School for Wayward Children — dead and in the arms of what turns out to be the love of his life, requesting help. The story then unfolds and brings the ongoing conflict between the two siblings to finality.

I think this book stands alone well, but if you’re new to this series, starting with the first book in the series, Every Heart a Doorway, would be my suggestion. The entire series has been quite enjoyable to follow.

Get one of my books!

With the release of Merced National Wildlife Refuge (see above for details), I’ve now published seven e-books, and I’m working on the next one. I’m quite proud of this new volume and I think the next one will be really good as well. You can download a copy of the new book, or any of my e-books from my download page. They are all free for you to read and enjoy. free e-books available for you to download and enjoy

... And the Geese Exploded, is a combination of a series of short essays about my birding life, how I feel so deeply for birdwatching, and some of the aspects of being a birdwatcher that mean so much to me. It also includes over 100 of my favorite photos that I've taken over the last decade here in the greater Bay Area, out in the central valley wildlife refuges, and here in the western coastal states in the U.S.

You might also enjoy 2021: A Year of Transitions. It contains 66 pages of images that I took in 2021, closing out my time in California and the first few months of our time in Washington.

There’s no overriding theme to these chapbooks, they’re intended to document each year of photos so I have something I can browse and share with friends. I think 2021 was a solid year, overall, but with few images that really stood out as outstanding.

California birders should grab a copy of Birds of Santa Clara County which is my look at some of the birds I've seen and photographed in Silicon Valley over the years. It contains photos of over 80 species, with images taken between 2007 and 2020.

About 6FPS

And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com).

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

Some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does help pay my web site bills. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.

Know someone who might want to subscribe? Send them here. You'll also find the archives there if you want to look at previous issues.