40 Yards: A Palpable Hit

Back here I was bemoaning the fact I wasn't hitting the target in archery at 30 yards.  Above is a picture of last week's archery practice where I managed on more than one occasion to hit the butt at 40 yards with all six arrows, though as can be seen here not yet getting groups.  Most of the ends, which is what loosing six arrows is called, I only managed to get four or five arrows onto the butt on a regular basis but that's a big improvement from mostly missing or not reaching the distance.

The improvement is down to two things.

First my beloved upped the poundage of my bow through a technical process called tillering.  I've gone from 14 pounds to 16 and now up to 18, which is the maximum that the limbs can be adjusted to at my draw length.  So in another three months I will most likely be getting new limbs, but I'm taking things slow and easy because of my rheumatoid arthritis.  My technique has to be right otherwise I might cause an inflammation in my joints, but compared to Aikido or Iaido, archery is a low impact sport.

Secondly, I've been going most weeks since the end of November to archery classes and practice really does make perfect.  Though I still have to remember to keep my up, fingers under the chin, and the string must touch the nose.  Not to forget posture, posture and posture.  I'm having a lot of fun doing this and it takes my mind off the novel and getting my second rejection.

Apart from archery we have been celebrating my birthday and our tenth wedding anniversary.  We had 46 friends turn up to help us celebrate to eat, drink and be merry.  I must admit that by Sunday I was feeling a bit like a zombie from not sleeping too well after so much excitement and rich food.

I've been spending quite a bit of time re-reading Mastering the Olympus Olympus OMD E-M5 Mark II, by Darrel Young & James Johnson, after confusing myself with programming my camera and then not being able to get it back into hi-res mode.  There were three days of high anxiety where I feared I'd managed to "brick" it.  Fortunately, with a little help from an Olympus camera technician and going through the book I worked out how to fix my problem.  I've now demonstrated the menu button sequence to my friends and every single one has gone WTF over the logic of setting up the hi-res function.

As an aside I re-read the online review DP Review where they say,

"All of this isn't helped by Olympus's trend of adding more and more extra features without fully integrating them.  For instance, the high res mode offers a choice of delays before you start exposure, but this isn't controlled using the part of the menu that adds a delay for standard shooting."

I now understand truly, fully, deeply what those words mean, but I still wouldn't trade my new camera in for any other model because while it's a complicated little beast it is stunningly good.

So that's it for another week.  Have a good one.

NB: You can see me shooting here.