New camera, burned some paper, and a word or two about the crows

First, an update:

Burned so much history, receipts, tax statements, pay stubs, and invoices yesterday. About 15 years worth. Felt fantastic!

Also newsworthy from the weekend. I spent my Christmas money (and more). We have a beautiful camera, a Nikon D90, but it is big and bulky. Now that I travel for work, short trips that are just a week or less, I’ve been looking for a more suitable travel camera. The iPhone 5 takes great pictures, but not really for capturing anything that requires a zoom.

I’m not really travelling to take photos, I’m travelling for work, but it would be great to take some decent pictures while I’m there!

When I went to California and to Denver, I took the body of the D90 without our 70-300mm lens and I was lost without that lens to zoom in. That camera is just so big and heavy and Jeff would rather I wasn’t tossing it in a backpack.

So I decided to copy my sister Julie and I bought the same camera she’s been enjoying. It is the Nikon P520. It is small and light and has a 42X optical zoom!

I think this will be much more convenient to carry in my backpack when I travel without adding additional weight or taking up too much space. It is sooo nice and light hanging off the neck strap too 😉  I’ve been shooting some random pictures as I learned the features, but I haven’t given it a real test drive yet. I like that it will even shoot in Nikon’s RAW format, NEF, just like the D90.

By the way, my next booked trip is to Portland, Oregon in March. Never been there, looking forward to it!

Before I go, here is a fun photo I took with my iPhone last night and switched to black and white. It is a photo of crow tracks in the snow at night, under the light of the yard light.

You may think a crow is just another bird brained visitor to your yard. But I’m still scarred by the sight I witnessed before Christmas. The two crows that visited under our bird feeder every day were not nearly as innocent as they seemed. I watched them catch a chipmunk and continually toss him up in the air, violently, until he was dead… and lunch for the crows.