Brian Yarvin

Thank you, but the real thanks should go to Bill and his very interesting photos.

That's "New photos from old archive photos on a cold cloudy winter day" for those of you who flunked Russian back in grade school and/or don't have inline translation.

Regis, the fine art and coffee table book businesses (which are somewhat related) are both doing really well at this moment. However, it's worth noting that they have little - if anything - to do with stock photography. Entering those niches requires a completely different sort of vision and very different methods to go with it. If you had told me forty years ago that stock photography would be dead and fine art thriving forty years from now, I would have laughed at you. I chose a career in stock photography for its stability. I was really wrong.

Just a tiny bit fewer than my entire 2017.

Even I saw a sale today.

I have used Capture 1 since version 6 and haven't seen a crash in years. I find it to be absolutely the best raw processing software for studio images. That being said, when I'm doing the sort of work that many of you do - places or events for example - it becomes less appealing. Do you really need this sort of power?

No, between the macro business and the very poor tech support, I finally sold all my Sony gear. Now, if I have to do macro in the field, I use a Canon sl1 and the Canon 50mm compact macro. If I have any sort of question at all, Canon will answer me without a trace of snark or superiority.

I tried it and found the Sony macro lens disappointing. I'm at the point now where macro lens quality is the most important point in choosing a camera system.

Very poor - too poor to spell out here. After months of improvement, a sharp slide backward to the bad old days.

Michael, this is good detective work. I am always very suspicious of Bing. It can be itself, or it can be part of a mess of malware that can keep you awake for months. Leaving a default blank in Firefox can make it more difficult to see malware-induced changes when they occur. Adding a default setting puts you in control of one more of the many thousands of variables that you are up against. It appears that I've never seen this malware because I don't use Firefox. Chrome and Vivaldi seem to be able to block it. Or maybe it's how I have my defaults set. Or maybe it's something else. Just be careful out there! Thank you for the kind words. I've been exploring Pennsylvania for decades and now live in the heart of Lancaster Amish Country.

Your link is very interesting, but not very surprising, reading. I would suggest that in the future, you never leave your default home page blank. For that matter, always select your search engine too. The only thing that puzzles me about it is why I've never seen such a menu. I've been using Filezilla for at least five years and forced an upgrade this morning in order to see if I could find the offending check boxes. Are you using Filezilla as a stand-alone or extension? As for what it is - if it buries itself in your registry and keeps making changes, it's a virus, no matter what its defenders want you to think. If not, I can live with the name "adware" and suggest that you do the same. Whatever you call it though, make sure its gone.

This is a very unlikely - but not impossible - series of events. Let's see what we can see ... First, since Filezilla doesn't have a "default homepage," you must be talking about some other software, most likely a browser. (Which always has a default homepage.) If a "virus" has changed it, test this. Change the homepage to something else and check it. An actual virus would change it back. Remove all the add-ins and extensions from the browser and see if it still changes the homepage to Bing. Next, check to see if that Bing page actually is Bing and not some other phishing page. This too, would be a sign of either a virus or hijacking. While a switch of homepages to a clean search engine is possible, it's unlikely. Then check to see if you didn't get an automatic browser update of some sort. This is the most likely source of a switch to the actual Bing site. If your browser is Edge, than this is even more likely. Keep us posted!

Well I'm completely ashamed! I have almost all those images on Alamy but lack the fine British keyword porridge. Back to AIM this morning!!

These are interesting questions that we must resort to BHZ to answer.

I'm sorry Wim, but wasn't Lake Wobegon located in Minnesota? I will grant you that most people confuse Wisconsin and Minnesota and speaking as a person who's been across both many times, they are doing so with good reason. For those of you who aren't up on their middle-American popular culture, here's the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon