A Portrait of Suzy W.
It's the start of the week for me. It's Tuesday. We normally swim Tuesday through Sunday each week and then the pool is closed on Mondays to "rest" the water and chemicals, and so the staff can do maintenance without interference from pesky and demanding swimmers. Since I'm up pretty early (for me) most mornings, in order to hit the 8 a.m. swim practice, Monday is the only day of the week I can sleep in, eat a leisurely breakfast and sit in the backyard reading novels. I guess everyone needs a day of leisure and rest.
The 7 a.m. practice was packed today and the 8 a.m. practice was near capacity. If you count me then there were four people in my lane today but all of us in lane four have swum together for at least the last ten years so we fell right into a good order and circle swam without a glitch. Up on the right, back on the other right. Yeah. Okay, just imagine the lane as a circle and imagine us swimming it counter-clockwise and five seconds apart (which translates into a little more than a body length between swimmers).
Our lane "leader" was Matt and he's the kind of swimmer that never slows down, always chooses the tightest intervals, and keeps the pedal down throughout the hour. That's why we like to swim with him. There's no chit-chat, we just get to work and follow the leader. It's a maximal workout.
This morning was beautiful in Austin. It was 55° when I rolled into the pool and the sky was crystal clear and untinged blue. We cheated and stayed in the pool at the end of workout to get in a few extra yards and to finish up the workout the coach had written up on the pool side white board. If you did the whole workout you made it through 3400 yards; that's about two miles. Not a bad way to start the day.
According to my Apple Watch health app my maximum heart rate during the swim was 154 bpm and my minimum heart rate during the workout was 88. Ten minutes after the workout, sitting in my car checking messages, my heart rate dropped back to 68. My VO-2 max was 38. I'm pretty sure I burned up some calories on this one...
After a quick shower at home (the showers at the pool are off limits during the pandemic) to rinse off the chlorine or bromine or whatever with a product called, ThinkSport Body Wash and Shampoo (which is supposedly formulated to remove chlorine and other chemicals that make skin itch) I put on some decent shoes and walked up to the end of the street to Trianon Coffee where Emil made me a cup of Kenya coffee and I bought an enormous apple danish from the pastry case.
The weather was perfect so I pulled a couple of chairs into a shady spot to drink coffee, eat a pastry and read articles on my phone. It was a great way to savor 45 minutes of happy down time.
I'm waiting for Jason from the Subaru dealer to deliver my new car to my house around lunch time. He'll also pick up the loaner car I've been using and take it back to the dealership. Once I've accepted delivery I plan to drive downtown and head over to Whole Foods for a slice of pizza and then I'll take a walk through downtown with one of the Fuji X100Vs. Of the cameras I've mentioned in the blog lately it's the model that most people have requested I write more about. I thought I'd shoot it some additional frames just to stay fresh.
Once I get all the fun stuff out of the way I'll start packing for tomorrow's shoot down at the Esther's Follies Stage on East Six Street. Yeah, the seedy part.
We've done rehearsal shoots there for years and I have a really good idea of what to pack as far as lighting goes. Unlike the giant organization of Zach Theatre, with its $24 million main theater and acres of computer controlled lights, Esther's Follies is pretty bare bones. And the lights they have are a jumble. I usually default to setting up electronic flash and trying to freeze as much action as I can while letting some of the stage lighting bleed through.
Tomorrow I'm going to drag in four 300 W/S Godox flashes, put small soft boxes on them, arrange a couple as side lights and a couple as a main and fill light. We're not trying to be fancy here and I generally need to shoot groupings of at least two actors and sometimes up to ten people on the stage at a time so I try to get f8.0 if I can make it work. I'm trying to keep everyone in focus. Much as I'd like to use one of the Leicas to shoot with I haven't really mastered my flash techniques with either the SL or the SL2 and I'm not even sure if I have a flash trigger that will work for them so I'll choose the Panasonic S1 (with the newest firmware update) instead. It hardly matters since the lenses would be the same.
When I'm making images on the Esther's Follies stage I usually like to work with the 24-105mm lens. At f8.0 I'm pretty sure I wouldn't see that much of a benefit trying to use a bunch of prime lenses and we tend to go through the skits and routines at a pretty fast clip so using the zoom helps keep the flow running smoothly. Since I'm a bit rusty (we haven't done one of these in more than a year!!!) I'll shoot raw+jpeg just in case I trip over my own two feet (metaphorically).
Once I get everything packed and ready I'll take some downtime to walk over the the neighborhood Ace Hardware to look for lawn sprinklers. They seem to die off every year, no matter which ones I buy. Cheap or dear. They just stop doing whatever it is they are supposed to do.
And that should be enough to get my week started.
Apropos yesterday's post about the Mac OS...
My first experience with computing was in a calculus class in high school back in 1972. We had a small office on our campus dedicated to telephony and some students were allowed to use a modem connection to a mainframe computer at Trinity University. It was punch card days. And the padded cradle for a telephone hand set was always a strange part of the set up. I don't remember the baud rate but I'm guessing it wasn't very impressive. We all got assignments to do some simple programming that would require main frame access. It wasn't until I got to the University of Texas, College of Electrical Engineering that we really had to start a serious engagement with computers.
Now, where did I put my circular slide rule?
Ah, to channel my inner nerd.
10 comments:
Talking about inner nerd, I wrote an entire blog about how much I love slide rules! Here it is http://blog.ericrose.com/i-love-slide-rules/
As you can see I still have them. Just can't seem to find the heart to chuck them out. Ahhh the heady days of engineering classes.
Eric
Your comment on Mondays becoming your rest days brought up a memory. A mechanic at my neighborhood shop told me that once when he went fishing deep into the wilds of NM, he got two flat tires. After calling a retired friend who came to his rescue and after a trip to and back getting the tires repaired, he said to the friend that he was sorry about disturbing his day. The friend replied something to the effect, "Not a problem. The advantage of being retired is every day is Saturday." Now that I am also retired, I commonly state a similar philosophy, with a minor deviation: "Being retired makes every day be Saturday for me, except Sunday. Because after all of those Saturdays a guy needs a day of rest." So, your Mondays have become a lot like my Sundays, or maybe it is one of those other days for me. Who can keep track of such things during these times of home isolation blending with retirement?
The last time I felt in control and on top of things with computers was during the era of DOS 5 or 6. Once they clapped an inept attempt at a graphical interface atop it everything began to get increasingly vague. Moving to Apple didn’t really help. For a further stroll down memory lane, consider the challenge of operating a nonlinear video editor based on UNIX and responding only to command line entries. Do you know how many UNIX commands there are? Holy crap! Once was enough.
1972? Probably NMT 300 baud. My first experience with programming on a remote mainframe, we used ASR 33 teletype terminal, with yellowish oiled paper tape. Probably 110 baud. Now, a musical or noisy greeting card has more memory and CPU power.
Didn't know where to post this question but seeing how you regaled us with such a lovely masthead portrait I decided this was as good a place as any.
I'm catching up on my TOP reading and almost fell off my chair when I didn't see a comment from you on this article (especially after someone admiringly mentioned you):
https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2021/04/the-perfect-portrait-lens.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2FZSjz+%28The+Online+Photographer%29
I still have my circular slide rule - I'm hanging on to that til it's time to vacate this world.
When I got out of the Army back in 1981, I started attending the University of Minnesota for a Computer Science degree. When the first Mac came out I bought one along with a 300 baud Apple modem so I could log in to the University's mainframes for my Csci programming projects. At the time the 300 baud modem was $300; the 1200 was $1200, which was just too much for a college student with a wife to seriously consider. But it meant I could do my assignments from home instead of reserving time at one of the labs (usually late at night because all the time during the day was booked.) Programming languages used were Fortran, Assembler and Pascal. When Apple came out with MacPascal I bought that and then I could do my assignment right on the Mac without having to log into the U's system. It was great. C was just starting to be taught, and none of the object oriented programming was around yet. Ancient days...
Steve
A few weeks back I mentioned slide rules to a friend, telling him I had checked ebay for the model I had back in engineering school. We both dropped out of engineering school and wound up in photography and journalism careers. Turned out he had the rule, a Post Versalog, in his closet and sent it to me.
I could remember how to multiply and divide, and that was about it. Sine, cosine, tangent and calculus are only the vaguest of concepts now, and even though he also sent a couple of books I can't think I'll ever try to sort them out. But it is sort of cool to have the object.
My first computer experience was with an IBM 360 at UT Arlington, working sith Fortran I think, and feeding it in on punch cards. The machine was the size of an office desk, as I recall, and less than one tenth as capable as my 99 dollar cell phone is today.
Have you ever done video with the Fuji X100V? Any recommendations?
Oh, the days of the old acoustic modem.
I still use my slide rule. It has batteries that have never quit.
I still use old fully manual Contax 35mm cameras too (among a few others).
The wife of a friend of mine was involved in organizing the student protests that eventually led to the end of the old regime in Czecho in 1989. They did a lot of their organizing on online bulletin boards (remember those?) fed by 300 baud modems the size of toasters. They were remarkably effective, as the StB (who were tapping their phone lines) had no idea of what they were listening to.
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