Longer Bike Ride This Morning

I went on a longer bike ride this morning and it's only the evening but I am already feeling the consequences!  

The ride this morning had a lot more hills to climb and, clearly, I was not yet ready for that.  After a week of rain, however, it was nice to get back out on the new bike.  I'm really liking this bicycle after all the upgrades I have added since it arrived.

This time, I loaded up my photography backpack with three different cameras for this ride.  Unfortunately, I ran into some problems.

The first problem is that the primary location where I wanted to photograph is now mostly obscured by trees that have grown significantly over the past few years.  This wasn't the end of the world but it was disappointing.

The next problem is there were people everywhere and I was hoping to capture landscape photos devoid of people.  Oh yeah...  the traffic on this Sunday morning was insane too!  They were all Vermont license plates so I can't even blame that on tourists.  I had cars zipping by me constantly.  

This place with taller trees blocking the view and people everywhere was my halfway point of this ride and my systemic mastocytosis was beginning show signs of impending doom.  I was a bit unsteady on my feet, dizzy, having difficulty breathing and generally feeling like things might get worse.  On my ride back home, I had to stop to take some emergency medications and use one of my inhalers.  Fortunately, this helped keep my body relatively stable for the slow ride home and the rest of the day so that is good.  

The next problem that I had is one I didn't notice until I got home and transferred the photos from my cameras to my computer.  For this first photo, below, I had attempted to shoot in a "high resolution" mode but the resulting photos were blurry.  It really sucks when you shoot a bunch of photos and then, after you get back home, you eventually realize that you screwd up and you have no photos to show of your work.  

This high resolution mode that I screwed up is supposed to produce an image that is 80 megapixels rather than the normal 20 megapixels for this particular camera.  This 80 megapixel image is supposed to be noticeably sharper and crisper.  I clearly had one or two settings set incorrectly though because I wasn't happy with any of these high resolution images from this particular camera

Fortunately, I had also captured a few photos in the camera's normal resolution.  I shot in a few different focal lengths (zooming) and I captured a couple of images in quick succession from the same spot and the same focal length one time so I ended up with two good images that I could stack on my computer.  I combined these two in post-editing on my computer to create a sort of semi-high-resolution image and it came out well.  It isn't nearly as good as if I had done the real high resolution capture but it is still probably better than just a single image in normal mode.  

My only complaint about this image, below, is that the sun is too high and the angle of the light isn't ideal for this scene.  I would have preferred a softer, warmer light from the side.

I also packed my infrared camera for this bike ride.  I pulled this camera out and shot three photos with it.  I'm actually wishing I found a few other scenes to shoot with this camera because I really like the clarity of the images that this camera captures.  Actually, I'm sure I would have spent more time shooting photos on this bike ride had my health not started to show signs of crashing.  I don't think too clearly when my health crashes which may account for screwing up some of these attempts at photography today.

For this next photo, I was doing some experimenting.  This was shot using my little Fuji X30 compact camera.  It is a rather old 12 megapixel classic camera that doesn't really have a whole lot of features by today's standards.  I shot a series of 12 images or so to produce this image below.  I stacked these images on my computer to create a super resolution image of 48 megapixels.  This came out surprisingly well!

These remaining four images were shot with my usual full-frame Sony camera.  No unusual features were used for these images...  just normal single shots producing nice scenes.  That being said, this Sony camera has a large sensor with 42 megapixels. I find that this larger sensor makes it so much easier to shoot with no matter what I am trying to capture.  If I had an even larger medium format camera or an even larger large format camera, I know I would prefer that over smaller format cameras so it should come as no surprise that I prefer shooting with my full-frame Sony camera rather than with my cameras with smaller sensors.

I need to keep riding as often as possible before the weather gets too cold so I can continue to improve my strength and endurance.  Today's ride was rather brutal though so I suspect I won't feel like doing much tomorrow.  Hopefully this won't cause my systemic mastocytosis to crash.

It was nice to get out on the bike again though and it was really nice to do some landscape photography.