The Capitol

Land of Kush

Alexandria

inside of the National Cathedral

White House

absolutely brilliant display at the Corcoran where the artist, Freehand Profit, created a gas mask from a Coach purse.

Mexican restaurant

Utah is a nice place with affordable housing, but I really miss having access to museums and a greater diversity of food.

The female was nearby but I didn’t get a good shot of her.  Jon found another pair of quails in a different location.  The female was still elusive but I got a decent shot of her.

I have a few good shots of the male too, although the grass always gets in the way to some extent.

But then he went onto the gravel and gave me an unobstructed view.

And then the coolest thing happened.  The wind hit the quail just right until it looked like he was doing a blowfish impression.

The 400mm lens is actually a little heavier than the 500mm lens.  Some people prefer it, though, because it’s supposed to capture sharper images.  That was not my experience, though, but there are many other factors I wasn’t testing.  For example, maybe the 500mm was newer.  The 400mm that I rented looked rough and had a lot of paint chipped off of it.  Also, the lens has a lot of settings that I didn’t play with because I only used the 500mm for an afternoon.  But I used those features in the 400mm, which is why the quail looks a lot better than the coot.  I still think I’m going to buy the 500mm.

A few weeks ago Jon and I went to Las Vegas for an attorney event.  When I was packing, Conner got very upset.  He could tell that we were about to leave because all the clothing was going into a suitcase.  He wouldn’t let me leave the room and he got on top of Trevor’s boing.  Everyone knows that the boing belongs to Trevor and no one else can touch it.

Poor Conner.  I’m sure he wishes that we could all live in the same room and never leave.

Here’s a grainy picture of the babies being fed because I took this with my 15-55mm lens.  Still cute, though.

And here’s a picture of an amazing dish called the Downtown Roll.  My diet encourages reducing carbohydrates so this roll is great because it involves no rice and it’s wrapped in cucumber, which gives it a delicious fresh flavor.  The inside is tuna, crab, roe and avocado with eel sauce and toasted sesame seeds on top.  If you visit Salt Lake City you should try Takashi.  Their specialty rolls are fantastic.

Coots are a good test bird because they have bright red eyes that are hard to see with an average lens because the red blends into their black heads.  Here’s another shot taken with a 500mm lens.  This one is really impressive.

I like the slight red etching around his beak.

So turning to the 400mm f/2.8, you can see that the coot has a red eye but it’s a lot harder to see.  And the distance was about the same as those pictures taken with the 500mm.

This one has the red eye, but the angle is all wrong.

Here’s a comparative shot taken with the Sigma 150-500mm lens.  It’s more fuzzy than the picture with the 400mm lens, but it’s not $7000 different, which is the difference in the price of the lens.

]]> http://www.avianexplorer.com/2012/05/coot-with-nikon-500mm-f4-vs-400mm-f2-8/feed/ 2 http://www.avianexplorer.com/2012/05/fitbit/ http://www.avianexplorer.com/2012/05/fitbit/#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 15:54:20 +0000 Elizabeth http://www.avianexplorer.com/?p=4496 Oh man, what a week.  This month is crazy and packed with activities.  Last weekend we went to Las Vegas for an attorney trip.  This weekend I’m planting my garden and I rented a 400mm f/2.8 lens from BorrowLenses.com, the same company where I rented the lens in San Francisco a few months ago.  All other weekends for the next month have more activities and work is so stressful right now.  I’m really excited about the lens and I should embrace all the activities, but it’s making me twitchy to think about all the stuff I need to get done in the middle of the chaos.  So onto a different topic!

As a patent attorney I need to keep up with all the latest technology, which makes this a dream job.  One area where technology and my own interests dovetail nicely, is in fitness.  As I think I’ve mentioned briefly, I’ve been trying to lose weight for awhile.  My job is very sedentary and when we moved to Utah I went from working in an area with no restaurants and no way to eat unhealthy food to being in the center of a town with excellent food options.  Just exercising and attempting to diet for the past year was helping me maintain my weight but not lose, so I bought a FitBit.

The FitBit is a little device that straps onto your clothing and it includes a pedometer and an altimeter.  The reason it’s so amazing, though, is that it’s combined with an excellent user interface for tracking all your activity and your calories.  The key to successful products involving the internet is having slick GUIs and this case is  no exception.  I’ve used a lot of applications where you can enter your calories and your activities, but they don’t give you any historical data.  In the picture above you can see how much I’ve walked for the past month.  The default goal on the FitBit is to his 10,000 steps a day, which is about 5 miles.  I’ve treated this like a minimum, because losing weight requires me to walk at least 15,000 steps and have a diet restricted to 1,200-1,500 calories.

In the image above you can see that I’ve been doing pretty well at burning more calories than I consume.  The one exception there came from when we were in an attorney meeting in Las Vegas for the whole morning and then went to a buffet for dinner.  It turns out that crabs legs are very caloric!

To lose a pound of fat, you have to burn 3,500 calories.  That means to lose two pounds a week you have to have a deficit of 1,000 calories a day.  If you don’t want to limit yourself to a 1,200 calorie meal, you can simply be more active.  For $50 a year, you get access to their premium service, which tells you about your historical food consumption and compares you with other users.  The above picture shows you that I’ve been pretty good at maintaining the 1,000 calorie a day deficit.

I really like the comparison with other users because I’m ridiculously competitive and I’m more motivated by seeing that I’m in the 95th percentile for the number of steps I’ve taken this week.  Take that, FitBit users!

There’s also a sleeping component that I found helpful for getting insight into my sleep cycles.  You strap the FitBit onto a wristband and it measures your activity during the night.  As you can see, I move in my sleep a lot.  On the nights where I felt like I slept horribly and I didn’t get nearly enough sleep I was much less active.  So I guess all this activity means I have really awesome dreams.

So far I’ve lost about 10 pounds in a month, which makes this a very successful product.  The most helpful part was being aware of how many calories I consume in a day.  A 1,200 calorie diet means having coffee and yogurt for breakfast, a salad for lunch, fruit for an afternoon snack and a healthy dinner.  I usually eat closer to 1,500 calories because I love those Chipotle burritos!  Last night I got my dinner there down to 550 calories by skipping the rice, corn and sour cream.  The tortillas alone are 290 calories!!!  And so delicious, mmm.

The other illuminating aspect of using the FitBit is seeing how ridiculously sedentary I am during working days.  In the chart above you can see that I biked to work around 8, I used the bathroom or got water about every hour or two, I biked home around 7 more slowly than I biked in the morning (as indicated by the yellow color) and I worked out for about an hour starting at 10pm.  So if you too want to lose weight all you have to do is eat almost nothing and exercise for almost two hours every night!  Kidding.  Except not really.  Where’s my chocolate cake?  Here’s hoping that I can keep this up until July, which is when the FitBit expects me to meet my weight loss goal.

But a couple of months ago, I found a toothbrush in the entrance way.  Okay, sure, hygiene is important.  It stayed there for about a week so I guess it wasn’t very important to the owner and the town really needs to get better at cleaning things.

Today was the weirdest, though.  There was a beet in the entrance way.

What’s the weirdest thing that you’ve seen around town?  Tiffany, I know you’ll be able to top this.  Underwear at the beach is a nice start.

I heard multiple calls so I walked up a path to get a closer look at one.  After spending too much time hunting for calls that were far away, I headed towards the entrance and then I saw the Spotted Towhee right in front of me.

He actually blends into the area pretty well.  His breast is similar to the moss/lichen.

His feathers look fluffed because it was a very windy day.

He was only about four feet away from me and didn’t mind me taking pictures of him.  When he finally flew away it was to root in the ground for insects with another towhee.

Nanananana – masked bird!  He has a really interesting rufous patch under his chin.

They have such a near pattern.  It’s not just a flash of color like the Vermillion Flycatcher, there are multiple solid patches and striped parts.

I filled the spray bottle with warm water and sprayed Trevor.  At first he ran away but I continued to spray.  Then his instincts took over and even though he was uncomfortable he puffed up and lifted his wings to get into the spray.

Conner tried to avoid the stream as much as possible, but cockatiels are flock oriented and he stood off to the side, catching some of the spray while Trevor got soaked.  Their feathers look so much better now.  I’m going to institute weekly spray sessions.