What a scary, roller-coaster, emotional month. Nice to see it conclude on such an upbeat note, with the renewal of your fondness for Roddy.

Almost like a shadow of the gull's alter-ego.

Always good to have one of those in your jersey pocket, isn't it?

Make sure that the description and provenance are somehow permanently connected to all such memorabilia.

We're combing through photos of my brother who passed away a month ago (unexpectedly and untimely; at just 74 it was far too soon) and those from his childhood are difficult to place in time and space. Hopefully my other brother and older cousins can fill in the gaps.

It does, doesn't it? All the photos here suffer from a variety of problems, regardless of which camera I was using.

That selfie has a it of "The Nighthawks" feel to it, which only adds to the appeal for me.

It almost looks like a black construction paper or maybe a painted image, on frosted glass, due no doubt to the low light coupled with uniform gray background, and phone image processing.

Not a great result, really. I don't know whether you cropped and enlarged a section of the image for the sake of composition, but the processing is very obvious. There's a "halo" around the bird and the grass texture and detail have suffered from averaging and simplification. However, for spotting and identification purposes it's going to be tough to beat.

That said, you'd likely have seen similar issues from the Lumix. I know I do with mine (60x faux SLR "bridge" style).

Easy to understand how she could be overlooked even with good eyes.

Yes. You really have to be zoomed in far enough that it can figure out the subject.

My Lumix has real problems focusing on subjects not in the foreground. Looks like yous thought you wanted a photo of the twigs between you and the bird.

Raven B or BRAVEn

It’s in perfectly good shape. I suspect we’ll use it again on the short flight from Bari to London in July, and from there to Leon in the fall.

Jacinto says we can just get an appropriately sized cardboard box. They are inconvenient to schlep around, but count as luggage. In 2023 we put my bicycle seat and all of our panniers in the big duffel. A really sturdy plastic bag (or a cardboard box) would also work.

Is yours in good enough shape for a third (?) flight - or has it come to the end of it's serviceable life?

You mean for the accessories, not the bikes themselves (ours were suitcased) - right? Pretty simple - from the airline counter when we checked in. Not on this flight though, but the one to Tucson when we had to carry the wheels separately because I couldn’t remove the pedals. The Alaska desk just hauled one out, and it was sturdy enough that I kept it and used it again this time.

It’s not the first time we’ve gotten one of these at the check-in desk though. There have been at least a couple of times when they’ve hauled one out to enclose my panniers so they’d handle more securely and conveniently.