Erich's Photo and Travel

 COVID Fatigue sucks...BIG TIME Guess what?  Mike's Camera has our Olympus 7-14mm f2.8 Wide Angle Lens on sale!  We have been waiting for the lens to come on sale.   I called Mike's Camera in Wheatridge, Colorado and our good friend, Jeff stated that he could get his hands on a couple of the lenses in a couple of hours.  Jeff (as always) didn't disappoint us.  The Mike's Camera team are awesome.  Why go anywhere else right? We picked up the lenses and headed to downtown Denver for a little street photography.   With masks on, we braved the semi crowded Larimer Square while on our way to Union Station via the 16th Street Mall. Our goal was to shoot Union Station at night was we just walked around snapping away. We found a really old courthouse building, Bryon White that must have missed many a times in our previous walks.  Wide angle photography at it's best! Off to Union Station! The temperature started to fall fast so we headed back to the car.   I don't know w

 COVID, COVID, COVID!   Need to get out of the house today and do some actual meaningful photography.  Enough backyard birds and squirrels! Just renewed our Denver Botanic Garden membership for another year.   We were not expecting a lot of color at the gardens, but we need to get outside. Low and behold, we were greeted with a lot of color and not a whole lot of people.  Of course we got to the garden right at opening. We decided to bring our "Lego Mini Me's" with us to show depth and basically fuck around. The garden started to fill up at around noon so we packed up our cameras and headed from home.   It was just nice to get out of the house albeit for only a few hours.

 We needed another project to keep us busy.  We have been dabbling with some small Lego projects (as shown by my previous posts) and we needed something bigger! After an exhaustive search, we found a Harry Potter set...Hogwarts Castle.  Lego had put out earlier versions of the castle but this is the biggest to date.  Actually, I think it is one of their biggest ever sets.  Over 6,000 pieces. The project took us three weekends (about five hours a day) to assemble.  The set included 37 bags of Lego pieces and four instruction books.  We only screwed up a couple of times.  A lot of pieces look the same but have subtle differences.  You only know you screwed up when the pieces don't fit.   We were not shorted any pieces however, we have bunch of extra pieces (all small, single block size). Here is the completed castle:

 Since we are not going on a safari this year (or Israel for that matter) we decided to take our big lenses out for a safari at the Denver Zoo. We opted to go during the week so we took Friday off and booked our tickets online.  We figured the earlier we got in the better.  Animals are usually active first thing in the morning. The zoo definitely had the social distancing thing down.  Timed entry, one way traffic and plenty of hand  sanitizing stations throughout the park. I commend their efforts.  It could have gone another way and then I would have to have condemned their efforts. Glad it was in our favor. We packed a lunch to eat in the nearby park after our trip to the zoo to help ensure compliance with the social distancing laws.  Saved a few bucks too. Great day at the zoo.   p.s. We forgot our cooler in the back of the truck.  Just got it out today.  NASTY.  I should just through all of the Tupperware away but we have enough plastic floating in the ocean as it is.

I found a hint online showing how to photograph some water droplets.  Well, in this case it is olive oil suspended on water. The trick is to add a couple of drops of dish soap to the water and mix it in.  Once the water clears up, add the oil. I have a lot of work to do (i.e. lighting, depth et cetera) but this is the initial outcome.

Another trip out to Barr Lake with only our Cameras and super telephoto lenses in tow.   We opted to bring monopods in lieu of our heavier Manfrotto Tripods as our last trip we were overloaded with cameras and lenses. I think our trial and error is paying off.