I am ready for the pandemic to be over so I can get back to world travel. What I am really missing is traveling with a tour company where they plan everything and all I have to do is show up. For this trip we took two weeks vacation and drove out to the San Francisco Bay Area with a few stops here and there. It was time to see the family - it has been a while.
Cameras: Fujifilm XT4; Lumix LX100 IR Conversion
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| Suisun City Waterfront, California |
Utah
Salt Lake City is a good halfway point from Denver. For the Utah stop, I chose Antelope Island to search for Ibis to photograph. That meant that we would need to bring the big glass, so needless to say, again, we had a bunch of gear with us. Antelope Island State Park is actually within the Great Salt Lake and there were buffalo! The website mentioned buffalo on the island, but my luck of never seeing them where the websites say they are, I was not expecting to see any. The buffalo were roaming free on the main road and munching on the grass. We were able to get relatively close, but not too close. We hugged the truck as we shot, buffalo can be unpredictable. They barely noticed we were there.
The lake was pretty low, so the shoreline was quite a ways from the road. There was a lot of haze from the fires in California so visibility was, well, in photographic terms, grainy. We did not see many birds close enough to photograph and definitely not any Ibis.
About three weeks ago I read an article in Outdoor Photographer about infrared camera conversions. Back in my film days I was fascinated with infrared but never tried it out. We both got our Lumix LX100's converted to the color enhanced 590 nm filter. I wasn't sure if we would get them back in time for the trip as it was kind of a spur of the moment decision. We received both cameras the day before we left. Awesome! Shooting IR is going to take some practice. Actually, it is the post processing color mixing that is challenging. I like the turquoise and beige colors, but when I showed some friends what infrared photography is from a Google search, they all raved about the cotton candy pink processing. I am still trying to find my style.
Safari West - Sonoma, California
We stayed a couple of nights in Suisun City at the waterfront and drove by our old house. It looks like the house was painted recently, I remember it being beige, now it is gray. The trees in the neighborhood were much bigger too, well it has been almost 10 years since we moved to Colorado. Por supuesto que comimos en nuestro restaurante mexicano faviorito. Aprendemos español!
Safari West is a 400 acre nature preserve in the wine country. If you can't go to Africa, this is the next best thing. We stayed overnight in a tent cabin, took a three hour safari on the grounds in an authentic safari jeep and enjoyed a BBQ dinner at the lodge. There were many grazers; zebras, wildebeest, giraffes and other horned prey. There was also a really cool bird aviary and a lemur island. I am really glad we decided to go, it was very fun and kind of felt like we were on one of our annual overseas trips.
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| Got to see an Ibis |
Time to head over to the Bay by way of a couple wineries...we came home with seven bottles of wine.
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| Benzinger Winery in Infrared |
San Francisco
We always go to 'The City' when we are home and visit the wharf. We were going to take the ferry, but since our hotel was walking distance to BART, we took the train instead. No more BART tickets, now you have to get a Clipper card. Pretty cool unless you want to add more to it then you have to wait a couple days for it to show up - kind of jacked up if you ask me. Oh, well...we made it to the empty city. Unbelievable! There was almost no-one at the wharf! There weren't any seagulls either. I have never seen it like that, the streets were devoid of traffic and people. The restaurants were closed, for Covid? Some of them appeared to be closed permanently. Very strange.
We explored chinatown, north beach and the wharf. We didn't make it to Pier 39, we prefer the other end anyway. There was no line for the cable car so we decided to take it back to the BART station. It has been years since we have taken and thought why not? We could not figure out how to add the fare to our Clipper cards so we bought tickets instead. Nice day in the city.
We got back to Pleasant Hill in the early evening and went to dinner at La Prada, a Peruvian restaurant. Pisco sours, Cuscueño beer and some yummy food! The next few days were spent with family.
Arizona
After an overnight stay in Flagstaff and more Mexican food, the plan was to check out Grand Falls on the Leupp reservation. I knew we were taking a chance of there being no water in the falls, but is was raining the night before. There was no water. Grand Falls runs when the Little Colorado River is flowing, usually in the spring from the snow melt. All in all, it was a nice alternative drive from Flagstaff to Durango through the reservations.
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| Infrared Grand Falls |
Mesa Verde
Mesa Verde has been on the list for some time now, it was just a matter of planning a trip out there. The fall colors were pretty spectacular, not a lot of trees in Mesa Verde, but a lot of shrubs in yellows, orange and reds. The cave dwellings were pretty cool and with the mid-range glass (50mm - 200mm) I could zoom up pretty close. We drove from pull out to pull out snapping each dwelling. We spent the entire day exploring the Park in color and infrared.
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