ABQ

William already shared his insights on our trip to Albuquerque last weekend. I’ll add a few other random tidbits.

I photographed the entire weekend with my (reasonably) new 30mm prime lens. Since it has a fixed focal length, zooming with this lens is extremely manual (i.e. the photographer must physically move). I was a bit concerned this might be too much of a burden, so I actually packed a zoom lens but I ended up not using it. Also, since it has a large maximum aperture of f/1.4 I was able to shoot a lot of indoor photos without a flash (which I didn’t even bother to bring).

The Albuquerque airport shares runways with an air force base. Fighter jets are super loud when they’re flying… and they’re even louder when they take off. It was kind of amusing to watch them take turns with the commercial jets. They were very loud even all the way across town.

Running at 6000 ft of elevation was definitely noticeable in the first few miles, though it didn’t seem to bother me much after that.

New Mexico apparently has a lot of dinosaur fossils.

Albuquerque has Bicycle Boulevards with lane markings clearly indicating cyclists are entitled to the full width of the lane. Of course, this is true on nearly all public roadways… but most motorists don’t understand this.

Mexican food is quite popular.

The Rio Grande has way more water in it in Albuquerque than it does downstream in El Paso/Juarez. I guess it’s all channeled away for irrigation.

It’s really hard (impossible?) to get the white balance right when photographing an aquarium indoors with low light. Either we ended up too red or the water ended up to green.