The more you see the less you know
The less you find out as you go
I knew much more then than I do now
– u2
Yeah, I know exactly how she feels. You listen to the forecast and watch a big surf roll in. You just have to accept you’re not going to paddle this day. Freya Hoffmeister has pretty much recovered from her injury and is ready to paddle. The gods however, have other ideas. As she says, paddling teaches you patience. In expedition paddling you learn to take things day by day, calmly and with prudence. Often reaching your goal has very little to do with you as a paddler. Success is in the lap of the gods.
For my part I only touched my kayak yesterday long enough to get it down off the jeep. Instead I spent the day getting work done and then enjoying a few hours walk in the calico woods. Each day I know I must get outside just for the sake of sanity. Most days I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do, I let my mood, ambition and of course the weather gods make those decisions. I just set my goal to get out. Even when the weather cooperates, there are days when I just don’t feel much like doing anything. I’ve paddled every little puddle around here a million times, hiked every trail, roamed every street. I sometimes have to find something to engage my mind just to get up the ambition.
Usually my camera comes to the rescue. Yeah, even that gets boring sometimes. I think to myself, “How many pictures of a bloody leaf could I possibly take?”. With the advent of digital photography, there is a glut of good and not so good photography out there. In autumn, getting a fair photograph of course is like shooting fish in a barrel. So i try to create challenges for myself, even if I’m the only one who cares. On yesterdays hike I set my Cannon XTI up with a fixed 50mm lens. Meaning, I have no zoom capabilities. You just look through the lens and see what you’re going to get. So basically YOU are the zoom. (If you want to get close to the ground, you get on your knees.) A fixed lens won’t let you be physically lazy. Crawling on the ground, going off trail, pulling the brambles off my pants and standing on tip toes makes me feel like a kid again just out playing in the back yard. I’m an explorer seeing the world through a little digital window.
The end result of course was muddy clothes and a gigabite of photographs. Most mediocre, some ok and a couple good ones. Out of the 194 photographs I took yesterday, only 35 are even slightly worth sharing and even 2 of those are just self portraits. Just a reminder that a good photographer takes a hundred shots to get that one good one. Here are the results of just one day’s hike through the woods. Click Here.
The more you see the less you know
The less you find out as you go
I knew much more then than I do now
– u2
For my part I only touched my kayak yesterday long enough to get it down off the jeep. Instead I spent the day getting work done and then enjoying a few hours walk in the calico woods. Each day I know I must get outside just for the sake of sanity. Most days I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do, I let my mood, ambition and of course the weather gods make those decisions. I just set my goal to get out. Even when the weather cooperates, there are days when I just don’t feel much like doing anything. I’ve paddled every little puddle around here a million times, hiked every trail, roamed every street. I sometimes have to find something to engage my mind just to get up the ambition.
Usually my camera comes to the rescue. Yeah, even that gets boring sometimes. I think to myself, “How many pictures of a bloody leaf could I possibly take?”. With the advent of digital photography, there is a glut of good and not so good photography out there. In autumn, getting a fair photograph of course is like shooting fish in a barrel. So i try to create challenges for myself, even if I’m the only one who cares. On yesterdays hike I set my Cannon XTI up with a fixed 50mm lens. Meaning, I have no zoom capabilities. You just look through the lens and see what you’re going to get. So basically YOU are the zoom. (If you want to get close to the ground, you get on your knees.) A fixed lens won’t let you be physically lazy. Crawling on the ground, going off trail, pulling the brambles off my pants and standing on tip toes makes me feel like a kid again just out playing in the back yard. I’m an explorer seeing the world through a little digital window.
The end result of course was muddy clothes and a gigabite of photographs. Most mediocre, some ok and a couple good ones. Out of the 194 photographs I took yesterday, only 35 are even slightly worth sharing and even 2 of those are just self portraits. Just a reminder that a good photographer takes a hundred shots to get that one good one. Here are the results of just one day’s hike through the woods. Click Here.