I’m making good on mine so far. I decided on a short but tough one today — I climbed up a very steep and muddy hill. Until, that is, my leg muscles gave out on me. I had to basically crawl the last quarter of it because my quads just turned to jelly. I took my camera, but no photos this time — I was far to worried I was going to have a heart attack (to say I was out of breath would be an understatment).
Never mind; it’s early days, yet — I’ll get fitter and stronger the more I stick at it. And hopefully it will all pay off as planned.
To top it all off, I fell out of bed the morning after — and my legs were still hammered, so I couldn’t get up! I thought the excersise would help me live a bit longer, not try to kill me immediately!
Hiking is a great activity. Just start it gradually, light terrain and short distances (<5km), then take a break for a few days, and keep increasing the distance and the difficulty. I find the Rother guides great for Europe.
My photography goal for 2024 is to focus on capturing, not post-processing. Specifically.
I should pay attention to light and composition when I press the shutter, not try to fix things in post-processing,
I should take fewer photos of a single subject, as having 20 photos of each bird does not add anything, just makes culling more tiresome,
I should ruthlessly delete photos which are not interesting, instead of trying to save them with post-processing.
My lifestyle goal for 2024 is not to snack between meals. I had some vague stomach complaints and after seeing a gastro doctor I was told that constant grazing disrupts my digestive process, specifically the migrating motor complex (the stuff that is happening when your stomach rumbles). I find this hard as I love to snack, but the improvement was immediate so I will keep it up.
Well, let’s nitpick first: technically resolution is about density and not overall count. And yes, I am aware that common language has diluted that meaning and everyone uses it for both meanings, including me.
Given that, my resolution will not be 20 megapixels but rather:
around 2380ppcm in my main camera
300dpi for the printshop workers that have no clue
90 to 120 ppi on my screens
unknown but nice resolution on my phone
other than that: finish university, renovate some stuff in the house, find a nice new job, convert photography into a paid hobby, … so, more of a todo list than some actual resolutions even if the year will have a rather high density of activities. Pun intended.
I find the idea of hiking interesting and really attractive in a general – yet at this point mostly theoretical – sense. Being outdoors (as opposed to merely outside*) is very appealing to me. However, where I live it’s difficult to find a route, trail, etc., that rises above merely “a walk”, though. With my interest in landscape photography, it’s a natural fit. Even carrying a ~18 lb. photo backpack could be construed as beneficial in exercise terms. But I think a hike should have an objective – a destination as it were, even if it’s a loop. There should be a reason for the hike, beyond just the exercise. That’s really difficult to find around here.
But I need to.
I turn 65 in 10 days. In a general sense I’m in good health: I take meds only for cholesterol and hypertension. Both are well controlled. Officially (per my medical records) I have a couple of other conditions but they’re mostly typical age-related things that don’t really impact daily “outward” life. Yes, I could shed a few pounds, but I’m more that 6 feet tall so I can legitimately carry a little bit. …a little bit.
Mostly I’m just not fit in a cardio-pulmonary sense. Several years ago when I rode my bike on a semi-regular basis (i.e., once or twice weekly) I could do 25-40 mile rides. But I was always the slow one in the group, waaaay behind. I ran out of steam before anyone else – Not so much in muscular terms** but in my lungs. And I get temporary tachycardia: My HR goes up but once I stop exerting myself, it drops quickly back down. As a result strenuous activity is done in “spurts”: Exert, rest, exert, rest. And that pretty much precludes any group activities, since I don’t want to hold up a group. I’d rather forfeit my activity than impact someone else.
* “Outdoors” == Hiking, camping, etc.; “Outside” == Mowing / yard work, being at home, etc. ** To be fair, I’m a flat-land rider and don’t do hills very well at all. At. All.
Happy birthday, @lphilpot! I know it’s a bit early, but better than late.
I completely agree. While some don’t need a reason (and good for them, of course), I most definately do — all of my hikes have an ‘end goal,’ whether that be a 5,000 year-old burial tomb, or more modern-day wonder. That iron-age hillfort I visited also has a beutiful old church there; it’s a ruin, now, but still worth the treck. I’ll take some pictures next time and share them (it may sound odd to all you landscape people, but as ‘street photographer’ it doesn’t come natural for me to do so).
This. I try, but I still end up too often applying oral porcine makup…
I tend to think of this point when I watch an expert (often using darktable!) effectively resurrect a poorly exposed image with stunning wizardry. But I also have to think - “Why wasn’t it shot better in the first place?” I realize there’s not always time, space, angle, light, etc, … even for pros. But IMO fixing bad images should be the exception rather than the rule.
True. I know I’ve mentioned this before elsewhere, but for me SOTA is a good one. Summits On The Air… an amateur radio scheme where you get points for contacting people from hilltops by radio - a pleasing mixture of geekily technical with the hiking/outdoors thing.
I did a sort of photo dump of a recent one here.
I don’t do enough for it to make a real fitness difference though.
But there was a period of a few months some years back where my only internet access was by mobile phone from half way up a fairly steep hill. (long story). So I would pop up that hill 2-3 times a day. I’m an impatient sort of person so always hurried and arrived well and truly out of breath, then settled down for 30min or so to rely to emails and so on.
I think at the end of those months my cardio-pulmonary fitness was the best it’s ever been.
It’s great if you can do that, but to be frank, a lot of places around the world are not able to provide that. I grew up near the Great Plains of Hungary, which is totally flat and covered in grass, with some patches of black locust trees; totally uninteresting and unsuitable for hiking, and you are either freezing or getting a heatstroke, depending on the season.
But if you travel a few hours you may be able to find something that provides at least an exercise, if not the scenery. I usually organize my holidays with hiking/photography in mind, and use the interim hikes to keep up my stamina and just be outdoors. Depending on where you live, just ask around, and search for “hiking near …”. You may find something nice.
I find Lonely Planet and Rother guides very useful, but also buy local hiking books (even in languages I don’t understand, maps and routes are always useful), and also use websites like outdooractive.com to plan my routes, they give you elevation info etc. Then I download the GPX map to my phone to avoid accidental 5-hour detours just because I missed a turn.
There are several woodland trails in my area. All of them require a moderate (~25 mile) drive to reach, but nothing distant. Of course, pretty much any mile of any of them looks like every mile of every one of them – no variation. But it’s better than walking around my small neighborhood over and over …plus you don’t have folks looking through their drapes wondering who that strange person is, walking by again and again and again…
To get a real change of scenery is a five hour drive, which makes it an overnight proposition. I plan on taking advantage of that when we go to Arkansas next April for the total solar eclipse.
I tend to treat these as a photographic challenge It is easy to take spectacular photos of a fjord in Norway or a majestic volcanic mountain in the Canary Islands.
But to take an interesting photo in a boring-as-heck beech forest is a skill. (Just to clarify, I am not implying that I have this skill. )
But I think a hike should have an objective – a destination as it were, even if it’s a loop. There should be a reason for the hike, beyond just the exercise. That’s really difficult to find around here.
