The Think Tank

Today was the second day of the State Indoor championships in Lincoln City.  I didn’t shoot quite as well today as I did yesterday, which is somewhat disappointing as I know I can do better than I did.  But, hey… This weekend was only my 11th and 12th day of  shooting after a very long gap, so I guess this isn’t a bad jumping off point.

I started the day tied for 13th (out of about 40), but due to the one arrow  I shot in the blue today, I dropped a few places in the final rankings.  The crew running the tournament was pretty green this year and didn’t do a great job of posting scores, so I never saw the final tally, but I know that I wound up somewhere between 16th and 20th.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, Debbie Lane also started shooting recently and her urging is what pushed me over the edge into deciding to shoot again.  She shot this weekend as well, and did pretty darn well.  In fact, she won her division!

We’ll both be shooting in the NFAA Northwest Indoor Sectionals in Tigard on March 12-13.  I for one am excited for the chance to improve on my performance this weekend.

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Today was the first day of the Oregon State Indoor Archery Championship, and it marks the first tournament I have competed in since 2002.  Chinook Winds Casino in Lincoln City is playing host to this years tournament.

Our friend Debbie Lane is the person who convinced me to start shooting again.  She was shooting in this tournament and I decided to join her.  Debbie arrived early in the day and went to practice early and was in the cabin when we arrived.

Maure came with Mom and I this weekend and Shannon, her brother Kevin, her mom and dad (Sheri and Brad), and Joel all came to watch me shoot today and cheer me on.  I really appreciated the show of support from everyone and wanted to make sure I said a special “Thank You!” to all of them.  It really meant a lot to me.

Today I shot a 300 with 49 X’s.  For those of you who may not understand the scoring, I’ll give you a quick overview. You can see at left a plot of all my shots today.  The white area is worth 5 points, the first blue ring is worth 4, the next is worth 3, etc.  The innermost ring in the white is called the X-ring, and it counts as 5 plus an X.  X’s are used as tie-breakers.  One round consists of  60 arrows, so a perfect score is 300 with 60 X’s.

I haven’t seen the final scores from today, but I feel confident that the leader will be in the 58-60 X range, so my 49 X’s should be well short of that.  However, I feel that given that I’ve only been back for three weeks or so (after not shooting at all for seven years), I shot pretty well.  My personal goal for today was to shoot a 300 with 50 X’s or more, and I came pretty close to that.  Better than the score, I felt that I was performing my shots very well for the most part.  Three or four on every end felt about perfect and hit pretty much dead center, which is encouraging.  A couple weeks ago I was lucky to get 5-6 perfect feeling shots per day, so this was big improvement.

In fact, today was the first time since I came back that I shot a 300, so that was good.  By the competitive standards of my youth, the 300 alone is a fairly low bar, but I’m more or less starting over here so I’ll take it.

I definitely feel like I can pick up tomorrow where I left off and improve on it a little bit.  Hopefully I can kick the X’s up some and get over 100 X’s for the weekend, which will satisfy my original goal.

I shoot the 2pm line tomorrow as well.  Any and all positive thoughts that you throw my way will be greatly appreciated!

The rest of this post is just a shooting journal for my own records.  Read on if you like, but its doubtful there will be anything very meaningful in it.

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Joel and I joined about 4,000 crazy Portlandians at the 10th Annual Worst Day of the Year bike ride last Sunday, marking our 2nd consecutive year.  That just so happens to perfectly coincide with the only years when it has rained as well, although I have to say that we were pretty fortunate in that regard.  It did sprinkle on us just a little, but it was hardly worth mentioning and nothing compared to the deluge that followed later in the evening.

I started off very well by failing to look at my registration information to determine the correct starting point, and went to the Lucky Lab in downtown instead of the one on Hawthorne.  That was bummer.  For Joel’s part, he actually did follow instructions (for once), but in order to hold with tradition he showed up with a flat tire that he had repaired at the mechanics tent.

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After a hiatus lasting nearly seven full years, I started shooting archery again this week.

I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, but I have been lacking the last push needed to get me over the hurdle and actually pick up my bow and arrow set again.  Last week my friend Debbie Lane gave me the push I needed.

She started shooting again very recently as well, and she registered for the Oregon State Indoor Championships, which is being held at Chinook Winds Casino in Lincoln City on February 26th & 27th.  She also said that I needed to get my sorry butt in gear and shoot it with her.

So I figured, “What the hell?”

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I took a few shots last night on the way home to experiment with HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography.  Basically you take a series of photos at different exposures levels, thereby capturing a much broader range of color and contrasts than you can get from a single exposure, and then you merge them all together into a single image.  The result should not only have all aspects of the image properly exposed, which is almost impossible when you have very bright objects framed with very dark objects, but the contrast level and color saturation is also enhanced.

Last night I was using 1 total f-stop adjustment over the course of 5 frames.  The end results were pretty cool, though I’m not sure that my subjects really show the full potential for this type of imaging.  You can click on the image to see the rest.

I’ll be playing with this more in the future, so I’m sure you will get to see other examples in the days to come.