Update – 6/23/24

Well, it’s been a bit. I’m still here, plugging away and generally far too busy for my own good.

The hot weather has been keeping me off of the trails recently, but I did just get a new 35 pound kettlebell to work with to help keep in shape. I’m doing a terrible job at staying consistent at using it, but I do feel a bit stronger, at least.

I’ve been experimenting a bit more with my creative side in photography, now that I feel like I have a grasp on the technical side. I’ve found myself using the 50mm Super Takumar f/1.8 I picked up a few months ago a lot more; while it’s obviously not as sharp as the Fujinon 18-55 kit lens that came with my X-T4 (which is a phenomenal lens, by the way), it’s got its own quirks and way of rendering images I really appreciate. I can see how people would end up buying dozens of lenses just to see how different ones work, now. The Takumar can open its aperture the widest of any of the lenses I currently own, which leads to some interesting options. The flipside of this is the lens gets wildly difficult to focus while it’s that far open, and the edges of the image start to blur pretty heavily. Still, I think the effect is cool and lends itself well to a lot of photos with clear subjects. Ansel Adams would absolutely despise me, though.

Aside from that, I’ve also been playing a lot with limiting myself in one way or another; shooting only wide-open apertures, really taking time to look for how the light is showing up in a scene, paying a bit more attention to my composition and trying to expand beyond just using the rule of thirds. I’ve also started reading a book called Tao of Photography by Philippe Gross and S.I. Shapiro. It’s been good to have some of the things I feel when I’m out photographing corroborated by other photographers. Learning the technical skills is obviously only one end of things, but learning how to be receptive to ideas outside of what you were looking for and flow with scenes is something that’s doubly important once you have the technical skills to do it. Making the technical skills second-nature so you can focus on the creative end of things is sort of where I’m at right now, and it makes me rather happy with my photo walks, even if later I realize I don’t particularly care for a lot of the photos.

I also took an hour or so last week to try and get some photos of fireflies; none of the photos really spoke to me, though it was already quite dark by the time I got out there and it made it difficult to do much of anything. I did, however, manage to get an interesting long exposure of the house that made it look as though it was still daytime. I’ll have to try to take some firefly photos again, soon.

That being said, getting comfortable with something is both good and bad. It makes me want to follow up, work on something else, push my skills or change things up some. To that end, I’ve joined my local camera club. I went to the first meeting the other day; it’s primarily composed of older folks, maybe 50+ years old. It felt a bit out of place to be there and be the youngest in the room, but it isn’t the first time, and it likely won’t be the last. I think my goal there is just to be a part of a group locally that has other photographers in it, really. Sometimes you just need to sit and talk with people to get a different perspective, and I think that while my photography is certainly my own, getting to interact with other photographers is going to go a long way.

This month’s photo club theme is “natural light portraits,” something I think I can do if I focus on it enough. We’ll see if there’s enough time left in the month for me to make something I’m proud of to submit.

Side note, I’ve also joined another club, and here’s a photo I took while getting blinded by smoke running the grill for our annual cookout yesterday. I like it; something about it feels comfortable, though I suppose shooting during golden hour helped.

I’m definitely looking forward to getting back to hiking regularly again, though with the heat that’s been around recently I need to be careful and make sure I bring enough water. Still getting all the gear together for my trip, and I need to book a few accommodations soon, assuming they’re still available.

Oh, and tomorrow’s my birthday. So I suppose that’s neat.

I hope you all are doing well, and take care of yourselves in this heat, please; it’s only going to get hotter from here.