Archivos de diario de febrero 2021

11 de febrero de 2021

Greg Lasley

I was very sad to hear from @ericisley via Facebook that @greglasley passed away at 6:30pm January 30 2021, much sooner than he should have. iNaturalist posted a blog entry about Greg here, where you can get an idea of what a great member of the Texas naturalist community he was.

Before iNaturalist, I knew of Greg but never had any contact with him, except for an email he sent me in 2008 about a Red-naped Sapsucker I had posted on the venerable old email listserv, Texbirds. It was so encouraging to get a compliment on my bad-but-identifiable photo from such a renowned nature photographer and birder. In 2012 I started using iNaturalist and our online paths started crossing now and then. I remember spending break time at work for a few days identifying bird observations, including several of Greg's hawk photos. I got this nice email:


Thanks Mikael for going through some of my raptor shots and confirming the ID. I don't think there are a lot of knowledgeable raptor folks on iNat as yet, so many shots do not get "confirmed" when I think they are fairly straightforward. Anyway, thanks.

Greg

Soon after this I guess Greg added me to his short email distribution list for local bird sightings, and it was fun to hear about things like the Cape May Warbler he found at Hornsby Bend in early 2014. Occasionally I'd email him a question and I always got a kind and thoughtful response.

In 2015 I had to migrate my photo library from Apple's iPhoto (which was being deprecated) to Adobe's Lightroom, and I experienced some of the generosity in time and attitude that Greg was famous for. I posted on iNaturalist about moving to Lightroom and Greg commented:


Mikael, I have used Lightroom since it came out. I've never used iPhoto or Aperture. I am pretty experienced with Lightroom, but have never tried to migrate other things into it, but it should not be a huge issue to start from scratch and move your images into Lightroom. You are welcome to come out to Dripping anytime and I can show you how I use it if you like, my workflow, etc. I also use Mac.

Wow! Was this for real? It sure was. One Saturday afternoon in September 2015 I drove down to his home in Dripping Springs and sat with him for 3 hours while he showed me his Lightroom workflow. (Greg's workflow was very much a direct translation of his film workflow, with some entertainingly luddite aspects. For example, he didn't geotag his photos. Whenever he stopped driving, he took a photo of his dashboard GPS display, and used that photo to manually set the location of all his iNat observations at that stop.)

Later that year Greg hosted a central Texas iNat user gathering, and it was so great to be invited and meet the people behind so many iNat usernames I was familiar with. (I even got to meet @kueda!) We took a group photo, which will always be my favorite Homo sapien observation on iNat.

After that whenever I saw Greg at a Travis Audubon event or something similar, he always called out to me and said hi, and he usually commented on some recent iNat activity of mine. He made me feel included rather than out-of-my-league. I never got to spend any time in the field with him.

Publicado el febrero 11, 2021 01:04 MAÑANA por mikaelb mikaelb | 4 comentarios | Deja un comentario