Street Views: New Beginnings
Squeezing Juice Outta Life’s Lemons
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My mental health went on tilt when the pandemic hit and I’ve been trying to get back to my pre-covid baseline ever since. One of the issues has been my anxiety, especially when it comes to being around other people. Before the pandemic, I thought I was really introverted. Turns out, i caught the AVPD.
So i’ve become a hermit. I have no car. I work from home. And outside of my wife, I have no support structure to lean on, which was fine by me. Unfortunately, my therapist says I have to form new habits/make and effort/whatever, and that means trying to do things outside of the bubble I’ve built for myself. So when my wife had to go and get her eyelashes done recently, I quickly decided to leave with her and practice effort making. You know, so I could at least tell the therapist I did my homework.
The therapist assignment turned photo walk started off wonky. My wife was running late for her lash appointment so when I made the snap decision to go with her, I rushed out the door with my camera bag, assuming it was good to go.
It wasn’t.
I only discovered how unprepared I was after we arrived at our destination: Blip Coffee in the historic West Bottoms. While she went upstairs into the salon for her appointment, I fumbled through my bag to find my Fuji X100F rangefinder with a nearly dead battery. I also expected my Nikon Z6II mirrorless camera body to be present but found the Nikon Z50 stowed away. Gone was my 70–200mm lens, replaced by the S-line Nikkor 105mm MC 2.8 and a TTArtisans 11mm 2.8 prime lenses.
Wifey gave me a 45-minute deadline to get my shots in so I tried to just suck it up and shoot with what I had. I mean, what choice did i have? But with Z50’s APC-C crop sensor making the (at…