New Lens for my Camera. It's a Brick!

I recently bought a new lens for my Fuji X-T3 camera. It's the Fujinon 16-55mm f/2.8. I've been wanting to get this lens for a long time. I've needed a mid-range zoom ever since I dropped my old one and broke it... two and a half years ago!

I hesitated over buying this one because it's expensive. And it's heavy. Writers and enthusiasts at DPReview.com, one of the photography sites I follow, call it "the brick". As for the cost, I decided I'd waited long enough and could treat myself to the cost. As for the weight... well, when I unboxed it I realized "the brick" is not an exaggeration.



This lens is large. Without the hood it's about the same length as my "bird shooter", a telephoto zoom lens that extends out to 200mm focal length, in retracted position.

( More pictures and text after the jump... )

So, how does it shoot? Well, the lens arrived two weeks ago— just after our trip to San Bruno Mountain state park— so the first opportunity I've had to really exercise it came today, when we went hiking at a new-to-us park in the foothills. I'll process the pics and share them soon.

They Moved Our Bucket! Again!!

I've written before that one of our "bucket list" goals is to visit every national park in the US. For the past 13 months we've been at 50/62, since visiting Virgin Islands National Park in December 2019. I saw today, though, that they've moved our bucket! The New River Gorge National River in West Virginia was reclassified as the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. This increases the count of national parks to 63— and adds one more park to our not-visited list.

Although I only saw this change in the news today it actually happened last month. The delay is due to the happy and sad way that national parks get created nowadays. Of all the designations for parks in the US., National Park is the highest. Designating a national park requires an Act of Congress. This national park, like all others named in the past many years, was created by pork barrel legislation— obscure proposals written by self-interested legislators rewarding narrow special interests with funding for pet projects tucked into larger, must-pass bills.

In this case the must-pass bill was December's $1.4T omnibus spending bill. Yes, that's T for trillion! The main issue in the bill was $900B (yes, mere hundreds of billions) for Covid relief. General news coverage: Politico article, 20 Dec 2020. The park proposal was tucked in there by West Virginia's two senators, Shelley Moore Capito (R) and Joe Manchin (D). Probably nobody other than them, their close patrons, and maybe a committee chair noticed at the time. Backpacker magazine ran an article (30 Dec 2020) a few days after the bill was signed. Even the park itself didn't publish an announcement until this past Thursday. The general media picked it up starting Friday, such as in this Washington Post article (22 Jan 2021).