Lunch Walk
Jul 10, 2023, Summer is precious for Edmonton folks. Spending a copious amount of time basking in the sun's glory, sipping their favourite beverage, and attending their favorite festival is a ritual. And the must-do mountain trips. With warm weather in sight, I decided to walk during lunchtime, downtown when I am at the office, and around the community when working remotely. After selling my only Fujifilm camera, I began to miss it. Eventually, I got into the OM system with an 11-year-old camera. The journey to get to the OM system is an interesting one. I will try to capture that someday.
Lunch walks have been an incredible tool for me to focus on my health. Surprisingly, my mood takes a dip if I don't get exercise of any kind. Lunch walks are borderline addiction at this point in time. Before I had my camera companion, I focused on an excellent audiobook, a high-energy workout playlist, or catching up on my personal phone calls. My pace was faster, and I used to hit 5km in under 50 mins. When I started taking my camera with me, my pace slowed from 3.5km to 4km in under one hour. I was happier because I was getting exercise and many street-style photos. The best part of my day was getting home and loading the pictures to review.
Yesterday was different. The moment I reached my parking lot, it started raining. It wasn't supposed to rain until 1100 that morning. I have a special relationship with rain, and I may need a separate tag on my blog to describe all the amazing rain situations I have been in. Sprinting to avoid the barrage of hail-like droplets, I half-soaked my shirt. Later, I realized I didn't zip up my jacket. I didn't think much of the rain after that until it was getting closer to noon, and I secretly wished for the rain to go away so that I could complete my lunch ritual.
I pulled my camera out from the bag and put on the wrist strap—a ritual of sorts. I decided to adjust the focus on the elevator. I turned on the camera in the elevator and later realized I had forgotten the spare battery and hurriedly started patting my pockets to find it in the shirt pocket finally. I reached the lobby, turned on the walk routine on my Apple Watch, and tried to find the nearest object to set my focus. It was an overcast day, and I decided to keep the f-stop at a faster setting than the usual f8. With the camera on manual focus and aperture priority, I set for my daily walk.
The air was heavy, and I could feel the dampness seeping through each breath. The weather somehow filled me with gloom. I tried to switch to cheerful music to raise my spirits and headed west toward the legislature grounds. I was feeling lucky. After a few clicks, I realized that the set it and forget it setting might be off. I was right. The focus was way off and I had a bad batch of clicks. "Which is fine," I heard telling myself. I quickly adjusted the focus and realized that shutter was dropping to slower speeds whenever I approached a tree-covered street. I switched the camera to the manual mode setting my shutter to 1/200 and f-stop to 5.6. The auto ISO cranked up but nothing worrisome.
I liked how some blurry images turned out with a slower shutter speed.
The legislature loop was mediocre, fitting for the weather. One thing I noticed was that there were many birds on the ground. I guessed they were scouring for all the insects in the damp grass. I chased a few, and they won't fly away. I found that interesting. I might have to look that up on the correlation of damp weather to birds sticking to the ground.
My vision trembled when I skipped a step off the sidewalk and onto the road. I was chasing a scene, hoping to salvage my lunch walk—another disappointment. I moved on and focused on my pace to get back to work earlier.