As noted a couple of posts ago, I get up very early in the morning, and during the pandemic months of 2020, The Pip has been joining me in that. This isn’t too bad on weekdays, when there’s only a short time between when I finish my morning routine and when Kate and SteelyKid need to get up, but on weekends it’s a bit of an issue, because they’ll both sleep until 11am if allowed to. Which leaves me wide awake with nothing in particular to do for a couple of hours.
The Pip is old enough and responsible enough that I don’t feel too bad about leaving him home as the only one awake, so at some point in the spring I started just going on long bike rides during this time (I think my record was about 35 miles, out the bike path to Rotterdam and back). Around May, though, I was feeling in need of a bit more variety, so I started doing “Photo Walks,” taking my DSLR camera out and taking random artsy photos of stuff. This worked both as a rest day from biking and a creative outlet (I also started going to a local park to shoot baskets by myself, just to vary up the more intense workouts, too…)
This started with nature hikes, but there are only so many pictures of trees I can take, so for variety I started mixing in trips to more built-up areas. This had the added bonus effect of giving me something to do in the afternoon/evening, namely downloading and processing all the images from the morning.
I’ve been sharing Google Photos albums on social media as “This Week in My Expensive Hobby,” and to kill some time yesterday I went through all of these and pulled out the best of the lot. That led to this “Best of 2020” album, with 187 photos in it. This is probably something like the top 5% of the total pictures I took; the individual photo walk albums are probably about 10% of the photos from any given day, and the “Best of 2020” album is a bit more than 25% of the total photo walk collection.
And just so there’s something visually interesting in this post, here are a baker’s dozen of my favorites:
Now that we’re heading back toward winter, I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do to take the place of this. One of the other problems I’ve discovered during this lockdown is that I don’t have any indoor hobbies that don’t involve the Internet, but clearly I’m going to need to find one…