brookie...

May, week one:
This beautiful brook trout is the first fish that I caught with my new fly rod. It is a native brook trout (not stocked by the state), and had amazing colors. This is a reasonable followup to my previous blog entry, although photographically it is not the greatest shot. However, keep in mind how hard it is to get this shot! It would have been nice to have my 30d with me, with a circular polarizing filter, but since my 630 ended up sliding off some rocks into the water while i was carefully removing the fly from the fish, I think it's better that the dSLR stayed at home. The fish was then released, and swam back to his little feeding hole (catch-and-release with gentle handling and barbless hooks are important to preserving this beautiful fish).

The processing was simple, but it was also delayed (May is now almost over). It got delayed because the day before this shot the hard drive on my laptop crashed. Then, I had to start working nights for a little while. Once I finished with my night shifts, I focused my time on resurrecting my hard drive and reconstructing all of the data from various backups. I've also since purchased several additional external hard drives and have set up a comprehensive backup schedule. I also use Mozy for online backups, and I strongly recommend this service (free 2GB backups) to everyone. Public service message: don't forget to backup!

Image details:
Date and location: 5/4/7 at 14:45 EDT, Rapidan River, Shenandoah NP, Virginia
Equipment: Canon SD630, handheld
Settings: 10.09mm, f/3.5, 1/100 sec
Processing: cataloged in Aperture v1.5.3 -> monochrome mixer (20, 80, 0, 0) -> contrast +50 -> resize -> USM (150%, 0.5, 0) -> border + text
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #17 (wildlife)