Boy Howdy! That last week was a doozy. I had a cold, a cough that wouldn't stop and a nasty bout of insomnia on top of everything else. I was out of the pool from Sunday the31st all the way until yesterday (April 9th) because I literally couldn't get one lap in without stopping to cough like a three pack a day drifter...
The combination of having been sick, deprived of about half my usual sleep and out for so long was felt in its entirety during my first swim back. I woke up early yesterday, packed up and headed to the pool. It was still dark at 7:00 when I hit the water. My stroke felt perfect but there was very little energy behind it and I tired quickly. I finished the hour and fifteen minutes but only by judiciously skipping a lap now and then; taking a few liberties with the written workout. That's a masters swimmer's prerogative.
I came home, ate breakfast, drank coffee and then hit the couch (Gosh! I love our couch!) and took a nap for the better part of an hour. I needed a bit of recovery before I could drag myself into the studio and start making calls. I'm looking for a talent for a shoot on Tuesday. The whole thing came up rather quickly and finding just the right talent takes....time. If you know a male, late 40's/early 50's, caucasian, who is in good shape and can take some time off on Tuesday, be sure and let me know..... I'm looking for someone to play the part of a doctor in scrubs, face mask, etc. And, yes, there is a talent fee in there somewhere...( Austin area ).
The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to unpacking from our condensed video shoot last Friday (didn't have the desire to grapple with gear while infirm..) because those rechargeable batteries are not going to charge themselves, the batteries in the wireless microphone receivers and transmitters tend to leak if you leave them in for very long and, it's nice to know the camera lenses are snuggly back in their slots in the equipment case. Ready and easily findable because....they are in their correct spot.
The most important part of the whole organizing and unpacking process is the getting the memory cards backed up. I'd already pulled all the video files from our shoot out and put them on a little SSD for my client/collaborator; the guys who is tasked with doing the actual edit. But he's still on the client side and my paranoid expectation is that if there is a way to lose, corrupt, misplace, reformat-over, the files I gave him it's almost a client's imperative to attempt it. I wanted to get a complete set of the files on two identical 7200 RPM G-Tech drives that I use when I edit. Now that I've done that and asked the client to back up to their server I am finally able to re-use those SD cards. I like my new Delkin Devices Black 128GB V60 UHSII cards. They are fast and new. All the better to play with...
Mulling over some nerd-side new gear acquisitions for the office. I'm toying with the idea of replacing my (2015) Apple 27 inch iMac with the new i9 processor iMac. I'd like to get one with a 1 TB SSD for the OS drive and 32 GB of RAM. I also want to trick it out with the fastest video card they offer just to give me a bit of a speed boost for video editing. The current machine is absolutely fine for photography file processing but I'd like to give the h.265 video file format available in the X-T3 a spin and I've read that the h.265, while a space saver during shooting, requires some intense processing to edit.... (yes, I am sure you are super smart, brave and infinitely skilled and can make your own machine for 1/10th the cost but I think I'll save a bit of time and just buy one ready made, thanks!).
And, over in the realm of the irrational (one of my specialties), now that I've worked out my one audio issue with video recording on the X-H1, I'm actually toying with adding another one while the camera+grip+three batteries are still on sale as a package for $1299. We used three of them on our video shoot Friday and as we slip further down the greased slide of video production toward the revised mosh pit of commerce, multi-camera shoots seem to be the routine and not the exception. And how often can one acquire a full on back up, with accessories, of one's current favorite camera at such an advantageous price?
I'll wait on all the purchases since my recent illness has made me a bit loopy. My bank called to ask me "what I intended?" on my last deposit. Apparently, I transposed numbers left and right.... Glad someone is watching my back. Thank you! Bank. Maybe I'll be thinking straight after a few more swims and a bit more recovery time.
5 comments:
A key bit of self employment structure that I've maintained for years spills over from many years of cycling. I try to take my resting pulse when I wake up as many days as possible. A chronic rise in pulse suggests fatigue. Sometimes the fatigue is from being out on the road, not getting enough sleep, burning the candle with a torch. Sometimes it's just plain "fifth decade" problems. Sometimes it's self inflicted.
Though I'm now far more of a "fitness cyclist" sometimes bordering on "recreational rider" the metric from more competitive days of knowing when you are fit, and hammering away that day, VS knowing when you are fatigued, and laying back (sometimes literally),is helpful.
Recovery speed, along with elastic knees, seem to diminish as the years go by. Usually a pet and a couch for an afternoon does wonders.
Kirk,
I recently had a cough which at its worst kept be awake. (Going to sleep sitting helped in the beginning.)
A couple of days ago a friend told me he had solved that. He used the kind of (asthma) medication that widens the throat and so it takes much longer for the irritation to build up enough to make one cough. (He doesn't have asthma.)
I try not to think about what kind of shape I would be in if I not stopped swimming after college (back when dinosaurs ruled the earth.) For various reasons (some of which were good) I had not been swimming for a few months. I found that I was back up to my slow pace and could handle the modest distance swum in about three workouts (with a nap after) but my shoulders are feeling a little tender so I am not swimming every day and cutting back on the yardage for a while. It finally looks like spring so I can supplement the swimming with a little running and biking so as not to overdo it.
And I certainly think that the idea of buying another XH-1 and a new computer makes sense for you. After all if you are using three cameras on a shoot then you don't have a backup until you get that fourth one. I have some questions about Apple's pricing and their ideas about computers, but photography not IT is your job and you get to spend your money the way you want.
I'm off to the pool for an abbreviated workout.
Good to hear you are better!
Just as a thought, one upon a time you wrote an article about renting why additional equipment when needed... Why the move to own so many bodies vs. Renting? Is it a lack of rental facilities?
I am glad that you are finally over your cold. I hate it when I get a "nuisance" cold, and really hate it when I get a bad one that lasts for weeks.
Have fun deciding on an updated iMac. While you are updating your computer, you might want to consider updating the drive you are doing video projects on to an external SSD drive. I had a hard drive with video files and projects fail on me about a year ago. I switched over to using a 1TB Samsung T5 external drive for storing video projects that I am actively working on. I figure that the frequent saving to the drive by video-editing software is hard on the head and drive mechanisms of a traditional hard drive, leading to failure after a short amount of time. I expect my SSD drive to be much more reliable for video editing in the long run. Original video files and finished projects, however, are kept on multiple traditional hard drives, which get (relatively) gentle use.
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