Erich's Photo and Travel

 Yes, I bought a new camera.  The new and improved Fuji XT-4.  The XT-4 is FAR superior than it's predecessor (XT-3) in all aspects.   You can blame Michelle for converting me to Fuji. Now, I must say, I didn't' blatantly spend money on this camera without having a plan. I sold my Nikon Z6 and associated lenses which more than paid for the Fuji.  I can honestly say that I feel good about buying the new camera.  The only regret that I have is that I didn't ask for more money on the Fuji "kit lenses" that Michelle and I had (27mm).  Fuji has NO stock on any of their lenses and I could have made a killing on the lens.  They both sold within minutes of posting them on eBay.  Dammit! So, you may be asking yourself what the fuck that this has to do with the RMANWR?  A test drive on the new camera.  Michelle was kind enough to let me "borrow" her Fuji 100-400mm lens.  Possession is 9/10 of the law.  It is now my possession. ...

 Armed with out cameras and big ass lenses, we set out to take a few morning shots of wildlife at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and Wildlife Refuge in Aurora, CO. The refuge is FREE.  Woo Fucking Hoo! We managed to catch a few shots of Blue Herons, Egrets, bunny rabbits and even a fisherman (extremely rare in the wild).

 We only get one good day of weather this weekend so we took advantage of the day and took a walk along the Platt River to shoot some wildlife.  Of course, this entailed lugging our telephoto lenses. We found an eagle's nest situated about 100 yards from the trail last week when we rode our bikes along the trail but didn't have our cameras at the time. The nest has a chick!  The mother wasn't around but we figured she was out hunting so we ended up waiting about 20 minutes for her to come back with food. This is as close as we could get.  I took this photo with my 100 - 400mm Leica Lens.  Not too bad.  Wish I could have been closer but a fence was there to keep people like me out. There were egrets and geese, and other birds that I have no idea what they are called.  I asked them their name but cheep, cheep doesn't translate well in my brain. We even spotted a prairie dog who immediately alerted his troop to our arrival! As always, it was nice to get o...

 Oh what a week we had weather wise! Last Saturday Denver was hit with a major snow storm.  The estimates were anywhere between ten inches to four feet. The snow started to fall Saturday morning and didn't let up until late Sunday evening. I tried to stay ahead of the game by shoveling about every two hours.  Glad I did! The sun came out and the snow is slowly melting away. Spring came yesterday and the outside temperature was 66 (36 today). Michelle and I bought new cameras.  Yes, I know, like we need another camera. No reason to stay indoors today.  Tomorrow, yes.  Snow is expected. The new Fuji takes awesome photos.  Just look! Finally stopped for a beer here.  Yes, just one beer. Just nice being outside again.  Of course, we wore our masks and tried to social distance as much as possible.

 On March 13, 2021 we had what Denver calls a "Major Snowstorm". We expected approximately two to six feet of snow.  I think we received about three feet in our neighborhood.   To keep our backyard birds happy, I filled up the bird feeder the day before the storm so we could take some pictures during or storm shelter in place situation. I took a lot of pictures, most of them blurry but the following shots came out pretty good.

 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.