“I Should” vs “I Want To”

6FPS V4#11: November 14, 2022

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Hello, November! Here in the Pacific Northwest we seem to have skipped Fall and as I type this, it’s finally rainy outside, but it’s also 45 degrees. It looks like we’re headed into the cold dark wet without any of the interesting transition period. Our Alder that lives at the edge of our driveway last fall turned some gorgeous color and held it for a few weeks. This year, it was a fairly uninteresting orange with brown, and half the leaves were off in ten days. I was hoping to photograph it, but now, any chance is over. I blame the dry summer, which… hopefully not… may be the start of the new normal.

Maybe we shouldn’t have broken the planet for short term profits?

Back from Astoria

I did finally take that trip I was thinking about, shorter and smaller scale but still very much fun and interesting. I ended up spending three nights in Astoria, a favorite place of mine, and using it as a base to explore. It didn’t hurt that the HR folks at work nudged me about how little time off I’ve taken this year, and nicely suggested I consider doing so — and I’ve now set it up to take time off around Thanksgiving and Christmas as well, and I hope it helps them sleep better at night. I think my total number of PTO days is around 8, but with the holidays, I think I’m taking almost 4 weeks of the next ten off. I’m not complaining about that, but I’ll mostly be staying close to home.

For this trip, I ended up driving about 800 miles across four days, getting up to Tokeland to the north and Cape Meares to the south, and just kind of re-acquaint myself to that area a bit with camera and binoculars.

There have been changes in Astoria since my last visit, and to this region in general. A couple of favorite places (the restaurant Baked Alaska and the wine shop Cellar on 10th) have closed. A small fish house chain I like (Dooger’s) has shrunk back to a single outlet.

This trip is notable mostly because it’s the first time I’ve slept in a hotel room since Covid started for any reason not involving moving to Washington. Laurie and I have both generally been very careful about trying to limit exposure, so far successfully. I got my latest booster two weeks ago, and I was only in close proximity to two or three people for the trip, none of them extended. But it was still a bit stressful, this first time back on this particular horse.

It was also the first time since the first Covid lockdowns that I felt ready to walk into a restaurant, sit down at a table, and order and eat a meal. Until now, everything we’ve eaten has been cooked at home, ordered for takeout, or delivered.

And it felt weird, and nice, to finally sit in a restaurant and have a nice breakfast (the place was, of course, Pig N’ Pancake, an Oregon coast tradition).

This was, of course, a conscious choice by me, in that it’s time to start recognizing that we’re now in the “new normal” phase of Covid; it’s not gone, it’s not going away, but we’ve more or less figured out how to cope with it if we try, with Boosters and masks at times, and just being careful. Covid is starting to turn into a new “flu”, societally, and I was finally ready to take that step and start figuring out the life I wanted to life in this new normal. And going out to eat here and there is part of that.

And the pancakes were amazing.

Trip Photography

On the trip I carried my camera, and I carried my binoculars. It was neither a birding trip nor a photography trip, but kind of both. It was more a “just go out and explore and see what catches your eye” kind of trip, which was just what I needed.

I got some nice birding in, and added 9 birds to my year list. I spent some time playing with the Sony, and took 61 images — a really low number for me, personally, but I gave myself a few constraints and made myself mostly enjoy the process rather than try to produce anything great. I do have some things I think I like, but I’ve just started with the processing.

A mentor of mine, David duChemin, is a big fan of constraints. He suggests giving yourself some constraints to free you from the risk of not being able to make decisions when the chance to make an image happens. For this trip, I carried my full bag of gear, but I set up the A7VI with the 28-70 and kept that with me, and left the rest of the gear with the truck. My goal was to see what I could do with that lens, only hand-held (no tripod), and with a five minute limit per composition. Kinda run and gun.

It was less about “is this a great shot?” and more about “does this interest me?” I did no research, studied no images from the area, did no location planning, and that was fun. It really was more about trying to start understanding what kind of compositions I want to make, and less about trying to push myself to “succeeding” at making an image. I have a couple of compositions I think I really like, and a couple more I need to explore and see what I can bring out of them, and I have some that I look at now and think “yup. nothing here”, but I want to spend some more time thinking about what caught my attention and whether I can bring it forward.

It was nice not turning the time off into faux work by making myself feel I had to create something “worthy”, and just kick back and learn how to use the Sony for landscape work, and have fun looking with no urgency to actually find.

I recommend that to everyone.

Thoughts on Buying an RV

There were two things that were on my long-term “hmm. maybe” list when we moved to Washington. One was the idea of buying a boat, maybe even one I could navigate to Victoria and back. The other was me wondering if buying an RV might make sense for when I (hopefully) am able to do a bit more wandering around with my camera exploring the wider region and at times beyond.

I fairly quickly decided that if you put the cost of the boat along with the time and expense of upkeep on one side, and the number of actual days I’m likely to spend in the boat on the water, that buying didn’t make sense.

This trip I took to Astoria got me pondering the RV again, so I decided to do a bit of research. I would be interested in a smaller van, what’s called a Class B. Basically, something built around the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter type vehicle or something similar. I might also consider a full sized van with a camper conversion, something similar to what Thomas Heaton has put together, although I have zero interest in doing my own build-outs.

Doing some idle searching on nearby RV dealer sites, I find that new Class B RVs built on that frame seem to start somewhere around $140,000 and go up. Way up. It looks like Dodge has a similar frame and RVs built around that can start for only $100K or so. Used RVs can cut that cost, maybe as much as half, and of course, with the used RV you inherit whatever age related maintenance it’s going to bring along with.

A simple back of the envelope calculation tells me that if I budget $150 a night for hotel rooms, I can stay in hotel rooms for about 1,000 days before I come close to spending that much money on hotel rooms.

That’s roughly three years of hotel rooms.

Now, that number is both quite illuminating and extremely simplistic. It ignores fuel costs, maintenance costs, campsite costs and the costs associated with accessorizing the RV to make it actually travel worthy. On the other side, it ignores that you aren’t building “equity” that you get back when you sell the RV, assuming of cours it’s worth more than the outstanding loan when you do that.

There are the subjective reasons for an RV — the freedom to go where you want, to get away from civilization (to some degree), the joy of camping. All of which I feel are valid points, but not things that sway me. I know those joys, camping was a big thing for my family growing up and I spent many years with a couple of weeks at the beach in a trailer.

After a couple of days of pondering this, I have some thoughts. I get tired of sitting in hotel rooms — that gets old. I’m uninterested in spending enough on fancy hotel rooms to prevent that. That said, I find it a lot easier to justify spending on hotel rooms given these numbers than on an RV.

If I could convince myself that I’d use the RV a fair bit, then yeah, it makes sense. But for the next few years, my best guesses are at the most 1 or 2 1 week outings, or maybe one longer (2ish week) trip, plus at the most half a dozen or so overnight weekend or mid-week trips. I just don’t see that much extended travel in my future any time soon.

So, if I’m estimating maybe 20-25 “hotel days” a year in my future — and my hotel time pre-Covid was below that, more like 10-15 — I simply can’t see that funding an RV purchase makes financial sense. The subjective advantanges don’t sway that decision. Now, if I ever get to the point where I’m realistically considering 50 days a year or more, then it starts looking more interesting to me.

But at this point in my life (hmm. how many more points in my life do I actually have? Oh, never mind) booking hotels makes more sense. Maybe even at times upgrading the hotels I book some. Even knowing that Yellowstone trip I keep threatening to take since promising it to myself in 2014 would mean more like $300/350/night for the room.

So having finally run the numbers, the RV joins the boat in those “it would be fun, but it’s not practical” list of maybe somedays. I’m not ruling it out, but something in my life would need to change to make it worth doing.

Free Prints to Subscribers

I started this giveaway last month, and I’ve decided to continue it for November. And yes, there are a couple of you who haven’t yet gotten your prints, and I’m sorry, I had printer problems and I’m working on it.

Anyone who’s interested in a free 8x10 print of one of my images si welcome to it. All you need to do is check out the images in one of the four portfolio galleries on my photography page, and then send me an email with the request, including the title of the image (or URL to the image), your name and a mailing address. My only requirement is that the email the request comes from must be a subscriber to 6FPS when I get the request. I will mail these out at no charge worldwide for any request I get during November, as quickly as I can make the prints and get them packaged up.

What do you want to hear about?

Since I’m done with the e-book projects, I expect to put more time on writing for the blog again, and while I have a number of topics in the to-do list, are there things you want me to talk about and write about? I have been asked recently about how I produce the e-books, and that’s on the list, but what else do you want me to cover? Drop me an email and let me know.

And with that, see you next issue!

What's New from Chuq?

“I Should” vs “I Want To”

One of the things that’s been on my mind recently is being aware of the difference between “I should” and “I want to”. I’ve always been the kind of person who likes to keep busy — I have my day job, and I’ve always had my online writing and my photography and whatever other projects that I’ve wanted to work on. A fairly common theme in my life has been to have one or two projects being actively worked on, with the next one in a planning phase, and a list of others waiting for attention glaring at me.

This could often turn into my weekends simply being work in different forms, and so just a continuation of the grind in different ways, without a lot of downtime. Trips could turn into “I need to visit these five spots and chase these key images” — also, not that much real downtime.

I think this is part of the reason I lost my enthusiasm for landscape photography; it stopped being fun and started being The Grind. After a while, I simply stopped wanting to toss myself back into that grinder again, so I stopped.

At some point I think I got tired of hearing myself say “I’d like to go out birding, but….” and in the last couple of years I’ve started being more purposeful about setting aside downtime, whether it’s a day where I go out and bird and explore and maybe take photos if something interesting appears, or — gasp — just stay in, catch up on reading and YouTube and just unplug a bit and relax.

It’s only been in the last month that this has crystallized into a thing for me, though, and I realize it is changing my mindset from always being behind on self-imposed deadlines, and allowing myself time to relax.

I realized I was shifting a lot of this project work from being things “I should do” and setting more of them in the “I want to” category.

My Astoria trip was all about this “I want to” aspect: I could have pushed myself for a couple of aspects of image subjects while I was out, but I chose not to. Instead, it was more about figuring out camera settings for landscape work (and making mistakes, and trying different settings, and…) and even more, just seeing what caught my eye with a “that might be a nice composition”, and then exploring it.

It’s the same with my woodshop. Progress is slower than I’d originally planned, but that’s mostly because I’ve been working on it less, because I chose not to impose deadlines on it. I’m keeping the shop work as fun work, and not something that takes priority over other things I want to do. Keep it fun.

The question I want to leave you with here is this: are you making sure you’re carving out time in your life for the fun bits as well as the projects? Or are you always on the grind?

Because I think if you are always on that grind, I think over time you will grind down that thing that made you take up those projects in the first place: the fun bits.

If your deadlines are self-imposed and only matter to you, why are you setting deadlines?

Recent Photography

As I create new images and re-process older ones, I post them on my site in the Recent Work area. Additionally, every Wednesday is Photo Wednesday on the blog, where I post one of my non-bird images, and the bird images are posted on the blog each week as part of Feathery Friday.

For Your Consideration

Photography

Birds and Birding

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

Recommendations

This month let me recommend to you a couple of recent purchases:

I have worn New Balance sneakers for a long time, because I like their fit and comfort. But I’ve heard a number of people recommend Skechers, and I was curious, so I bought a pair to see what I thought. The Skechers Go Walk Arch Fit slip-ons, at least, have really sold me and I’m now wearing them regularly. They are comparably priced to the New Balance shoes I’ve been wearing, and so I’m happy to have a couple of options her. I still wear the NB shoes when out on off-trail walks, but for more casual stuff or shopping, the Skechers are now my go-to.

For my Astoria trip, I wanted a way to attach the iPhone to my big tripod, and a mini-tripod designed to be used with it. I ended up buying the JOBY JB01550-BWW TelePod Mobile Tripod for Smartphone and Camera, which at $50 isn’t super-cheap, but I’ve found it to be well built and while I haven’t used it a lot, it’s definitely been added to my standard kit I carry when I go out shooting.

About 6FPS

And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com).

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