New Toys and a Little News

The silence has been pretty complete for us lately. Since returning from Mexico, we've been experiencing a combination of recovery from our travels and a hectic effort to get a few things done.



One of the things accomplished is I now have two (and a half) new lenses for the X-H1! I have the 100-400 mm lens along with the 1.4x teleconverter. This give me a 140-560 mm lens that is much smaller than the 200-500 Nikon. Converting from the full size to the crop sensor of the Fuji, I have the same angle of view as a 212-851 mm on the Nikon. Compared to the 700mm I get on the Nikon with the 1.4x teleconverter included, this is a good deal. All I give up is the ability to crop quite so heavily, but perhaps now I won't have to, right!?

The photo at the top is the arbor at the front gate I took at 560 mm. Nothing great about the photo. Even the focus leaves a lot to be desired. But it was taken in a mood of excitement when first unpacking. The hummingbird feeder below is also taken at maximum focal length. Both pictures are uncropped.

The second lens is an 10-24mm f4 zoom. This is equivalent to a 15-36 mm lens on a full-frame sensor and I have learned over the last few years that this is a good range for me in a city. The Fuji x100s I carried on our city excursions in through Australia had a fixed lens of 23 mm and I was quite happy with that focal length. At the short end of the range I have roughly the equivalent of the 14 mm I typically use on the Nikon to photograph churches and the like. And since I have noticed that I seldom shoot at apertures wider than f8 or f5.6 90% of the time, this lens is a good fit for me. For that 10% of the time when I really need the light, I still have the 35mm f2 to use. Thus, with these three lenses: 35 mm f2, 10-24 mm f4, 100-400 mm f4.5-5.6 (+ teleconverter), I have a set that I think will work quite well for travel. Especially in Europe...more below.

This last photo below is out our front door shot at 10 mm, f8, 1/18s.

As you can see from the photos, it is raining (#shock_and_surprise). We left Cabo at 100F and flew to Seattle at 68F and clear blue skies. We missed the terrible smoke that filled the skies for weeks during the worst of the western fires. It was great. Then, about 10 days after we returned, the temp dropped a bit more, the skies clouded up and it started to rain. This is why I don't have any decent images for you yet. If the water will slow just a little, I promise I'll do better.

We've filled our days with fun of wrangling with pharmacies. It took two weeks to get prescriptions filled at the pharmacy we've been using. Needless to say, we have now switched to a new place. Just to make it more interesting, E also switched doctors. My move to Medicare in August threw everything into a cocked hat. E has been on my insurance since we retired. This change forced a split of our policies so that Anthem went back to using an out of date address for her. This meant many calls to sort it out. We still don't have permanent cards for her. For a while the insurance company could not get the right information to the doctor or pharmacist even over the phone. It was a mess. But all is sorted now.

Soon we'll be back in Virginia for a couple weeks and then we'll drive our stored belongings back across the country. Should be a fun trip.

Plans are well advanced for travel later in the fall and winter. E is going to spend a week housesitting in Puerto Rico with her niece Jeanne. In November, we're off to Las Vegas (NV) to see what we can see. We are going on a Bald Eagle viewing trip on the Skagit river the first weekend in December and the next weekend I'm going to spend in New Mexico at Bosque del Apache in a photography workshop. That is migration season for the Sandhill Cranes there. And later in December, we start a European adventure. The details of the house sit we'll have in London at Christmas are still unsettled, but on the 4th of January we head to Valencia, Spain to pet sit and learn to cook paella. We then have a house/pet sit in Malaga to enjoy the fragrances of the olive and orange. Then it is back to London because, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, "Who could tire of London?".

But other than this, we are just lazy old retired people, not really doing much of anything.