I was getting notifications all day for solar storm activities that had the potential to create auroras all the way in Colorado. When I got home from work, I spent the early evening researching and deciding where to go to try and capture it. There were some clouds to the North, which wouldn't clear up completely until early morning. But the forecast for the lights was better earlier in the night. So I made the decision to go early.

I have to drive either East or West an hour to get to a dark area with little light pollution. Going West means that the lights of Cheyenne would be to the North, so I planned to go East. About an hour away is Jackson Lake State Park, which seemed like a good place to go since I wanted an interesting foreground to supplement the Northern Lights sky.

I got to the lake around 9:30 pm where I stayed for a little over an hour before heading back and getting home right around midnight. I wasn't the only one who had the idea to come to this area to catch the Northern Lights. There were a handful of cars in the parking lot when I arrived, and several dozen by the time I left. While I was on the shore taking photos you could hear people halfway around the lake cheering about bursts of light that would appear and general conversations about camera settings.

This solar storm was good enough to see faint magenta colors on the horizon and white light pillars, but you couldn't see any of the greens with the naked eye. It wasn't as good of a show as when I went out in May to the Pawnee Buttes, but it was still a good show and I'm glad I went.

Mike's Camera brought back one of their events that I loved so much: demo days at the Denver Zoo. They stopped doing this in 2020 due to Covid and haven't done it since. I figured they weren't going to bring it back when I saw in one of their email newsletters that it would be this weekend. I had given up hope in this event since they hadn't done it in 5 years.

I rented an R5 camera body which is the bigger version of the camera I have. It has twice the pixel density (45MP) which means that I can crop in on the photos without losing as much detail, and it has in-body image stabilization which helps shoot handheld with telephoto lenses.

For the lenses I rented, I started out with the RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1. That lens was perfect for the zoo and produced very sharp photos, unlike the cheaper RF 100-400mm f/5.6-8 lens that I already own. The only downside is that the lens is bulky and heavy, which wouldn't be a good fit in my lens lineup. But it was fun to play with and I rented that lens for 3 hours before exchanging it for something else.

My second lens rental for the day was the RF 100 f/2.8 macro lens. There were some flowers around that I made use of this lens on, but I didn't really have enough time to get used to it. That's the first lens that I've used that has a spherical aberration adjustment. That seems like a handy feature but I didn't understand enough of what it was doing for it to matter in the short window that I had the lens for.

The last lens that I rented for the day was the RF 135mm f/1.8 lens. This is a portrait lens. Of all the lenses I tried, this one fits my needs the most in landscape photography, although right on the edge of being too zoomed in. That lens was also quite heavy for everyday use.

Throughout the day I was able to hook up to some much nicer lenses that they had stationed around the zoo. For Canon, that was the RF 200-800 f/6.3-9 and the RF 400mm f/2.8 lense. The latter lens by far outperformed the former, but they were both nice and fun lenses to use.

Here's a summary of the equipment I rented (and its cost to buy new):

We didn't have a lot of time to hike this weekend. Katie and I were going over to a friend's house for dinner, so we needed to hike and be home no later than 3 to get ready for dinner. Because of that, we planned for a hike that's a little closer to home. With cooler temperatures, staying a little bit lower (instead of going far into the high mountains) was our plan. Hiking Storm Mountain seemed like a good option.

I always enjoy hiking Storm Mountain because of it's healing landscape from when the area was decimated in 2020 by the Cameron Peak fire. Since then, the ecology has drastically changed each year. The first year it was all black charred trees, the second year some of those trees had fallen, then shrubbery started growing, and now there is a small aspen presence. The aspens are very short, but they're starting to take over now that there isn't any competition for light from the trees that once were there. Several years from now, this area will be a fantastic hike for fall color hunting. I hope it stays a quiet, lesser-known trail.

I woke up at 4am to take pictures of the moon setting over Longs Peak. Since it was still dark, I knew that the photos wouldn't turn out great, but I wanted to practice for a few days from now shooting the moon when it's at its fullest. On October 17th, the moon will set right before sunrise, so I'm hoping for great lighting. But I need to practice to make sure I don't miss the shot. For this time, I was practicing if I could capture the moon between Longs Peak and Meeker, but I missed it by just a little bit. Because the moon is sweeping so low across the sky, my position has to be perfect to land the moon where I want it. My positioning was only off by about 100 feet to have the moon set right between the two peaks.

The moon was the closest to Earth on October 17th, which also coincided with a full moon. I've been preparing for this day for a little while to see if I could capture it behind Longs and Meeker. It also set right around sunrise, which meant that the lighting would be pretty good to capture the moon and the surrounding mountains.

The position I needed to be in to capture it was in Longmont, about 10 minutes from my work. So I woke up early and went to Sandstone Ranch Open Space where I found a small pond to grab the moon's reflection in the water.

Unfortunately, it was a little cloudy, but I still got a few shots of it between the clouds.

The weather wasn't looking great the weekend. Rainy both days. But the forecast cleared up at the last minute and we grabbed a timed entry ticket to get into the Bear Lake Corridor in Rocky. With snow forecasted overnight, we hoped to have some fresh powder to hike on, but very little fell. But it was frosty and a little bit of snow in a few spots made us feel like it was finally getting close to winter hiking in the mountains.

We picked the hike to Lake Helene based on the distance and elevation gain being right in the zone where we've been hiking. Plus, this trail starting at the Bear Lake parking lot is less busy than any of the other trails.

It was a nice hike that is getting us excited for winter hiking. Fewer crowds, crisper mountains, and less sweating.