CPFCSSWO: Week 4, Day 3

Post Push-up Pump

Sit-ups: 45, 50, 45 45, 70

Squats: 40, 45, 40, 40, 80

Push-ups: 29, 33, 29, 29, 40

CPFCSWWO: Week 4, Day 1, Column 3

Squats: 29,34,29, 29, 80

Sit-ups: 32,38, 32, 32, 51

Push-ups: 21, 25, 21, 21, 32

CPFCSWWO: Week 3, Day 3, Column 3

It is week 3, day 3 of the Camera Play for Couple Six Week Workout. It’s getting hard. I might have to put on “Gonna Fly Now”!

Sit-ups: 33, 44, 30, 30, 56

Squats: 30, 38, 27, 27, 50

Push-ups: 22, 30, 20, 20, 40

CPFCSWWO: Week 3, Day 2, Column 3

No photo. Just failure numbers:

Sit-ups: 50

Squats: 46

Push-ups: 35

If you’ve got number, post’em! Thanks for helping me stay motivated!

Week 3 of the Camera Play for Couples Six Week Workout

 
33 Sit-ups

Have you been keeping up? Things have been spotty here at Casa Comstock with the Camera Play for Couples Six Week Workout. Some flu-ish thing came home from school with our eldest daughter and we’ve been pretty mopey the past week our so.

None the less, days missed or not, I’m up to Week 3, Day 1, Column 3 of 100 Pushups, 200 Situps, and 200 Squats. You know how it works, you do reps according to numbers on your day/column and then do the last set to failure. Here are my failures:

Sit-Ups: 33

Squat: 40

Push-Ups: 30

That’s good enough to move on to Week 3, Day 2, Column 3; which we’ll tackle on Wednesday.

Till then, if you’ve bust out your reps, let me know and I’ll post ‘em here!

The Camera Play for Couples Six Week Workout

On my way to 100 squats

Thanks to Hubman and Ell, the HundredPushup.com challenge has evolved. It is now the Camera Play for Couples Six Week Workout; a six week program of push-ups, sit-ups, and squats.

Today Peggy and I did Week One, Day One of the HundredPushups.com program and Week One, Day One of the TwoHundredsitups.com program.

We also did our initial test for the TwoHundredSquats.com program.

The results?

Peggy did 76 squats and I did 100. (That’s me around squat #50.)

Why is the image so blurry?

I’d like to say it’s art, or that it’s the camera’s fault, but the number one issue is vanity!

Mostly I like what I see when I look in the mirror. I’ll be brushing my teeth and think, “My goodness you’re a handsome devil. No wonder all the women go crazy for you!’

But something weird happens when I actually see photos of myself. My arms and shoulders get smaller, my belly gets bigger. My ass, which looks large and powerful when I look at myself in the mirror just looks big and fat in a photo. My back, which looks like it had a mild acne problem in the mirror, looks like a WWI battlefield in photos.

I don’t imagine I’m much different from the average person in this respect, and as photographer, I know the “me” that people see is a lot closer to the “me” that I see in the mirror than the “me” I see in photos. Nonetheless, I don’t especially like feeling this way about my photographic image. Do you remember that scene in AMERICAN BEAUTY, the one where Lester Burnham goes jogging with his gay neighbors?

“What are you trying to do Lester? Are you looking to put on some muscle or increase your cardio?” they ask as they start to pull away from poor Lester, already sweating and puffing.

“I just want to look good naked!” comes his plaintive reply.

Me too Lester, me too. Tomorrow it’s Week One, Day One of TwoHundredSquats.com!

100 Push-ups: Test Results

Tony: 43 push-ups, 45 sit-ups

Peggy: 38 push-ups, 42 sit-ups

Hubman: 37 push-ups, 46 sit-ups

Ell: 14 push-ups, 53 “good form” squats

Keep in mind: Peggy, and I all did the HundredPushUps.com program earlier this year. IIRC, my first try was 23 pushup and Peggy’s was 18. The number’s we’re throwing up are residual benefit, and we didn’t even complete the program. (Hubman, on the other hand is a just a natural stud!)

So why not jump in! Add your test result in the comments or via e-mail and I’ll bump ‘em into the post!

Some technical notes on the video clip:

The video of me doing my push-ups was made with our Canon PowerShot on video-mode. I wanted to do a little work in the contrast range before I posted it so I brought into iMovie, the free video-editing software that comes with the MacOS. But dammit, I couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted to do, so I ended up bringing it into FinalCutPro, which is much more complicated and is not free. I guess I’m going to have to do a little woodshedding!

The video was shot on auto exposure and auto color balance. Exposure is how much light goes into the camera, and color balance is the way digital cameras account for the various “color temperature” we experience; from the very blue light of an overcast day, to the clean white of normal day light and flash, to the warm amber of light bulbs. These days most cameras have at least five color temp setting: auto, daylight, indoor (tunstun lightbulbs), flourecent, and manual (which you can set by pointing the camera at a white card to give the camera a reference point.

Most of the time Auto is good enough for snapshots and even a lot of more deliberate photography. But if you start to push your photos away from “average” subject, lighting, and/or composition, Auto has a harder time figuring out what the camera is seeing. That’s when the other settings can help you get the results you want.

Shooting across color balance can yield pleasant result too. Some of you might remember the Levi’s commercials with their distinctive blue look. That was achieve by shooting indoor balanced film under outdoor light. You can go the other way and get a nice warm effect. Doing this will also mute colors, which can be frustrating or pleasing, depending.

In the case of the above video, the camera is being fed a bunch of conflicting and changing information. Blueish light coming from a West-facing window, skin tone plus the ceiling to try and interpret with the balance between the two changing as the amount of me in the frame changes. Rather than try and correct this, I boosted it a little in FinalCutPro by increasing the saturation, which exagerates the camera’s misinterpretation of the information it’s getting.

Over used, in find effects like this wearing. I couldn’t finish Maulan Rouge. But a bit here and there, short films, music videos, etc. is fun. A lot of expressiveness can be achieved by playing with color balance, exposure and contrast; both at the time of the exposure and in post. Maybe something to play with while you’re recovering from your push-up test!

100 Push-ups. Who’s with us?

Back around the beginning the year I saw some people twittering about 100 push-up. I googled it and found HundredPushups.com, a site that promised to take anyone from zero to one hundred push-up in six weeks.

I like doing physical things, but I’ve never been one to work out just to work out. I’ve just stayed in shape through being active.

Peggy on the other hand is a gym rat from way back . When I met her she was living in apartment with a gym in the basement and was doing something like two hours a day – running on the treadmill, lifting weights. She had a six pack and striated delts.

15 years, two kids, 6 films, several hundred gallons of ice cream and untold case of beer later, both of us have to make a point of staying in shape, otherwise it just doesn’t happen. So we dove into the HundredPushUps.com program –a little competition and camaraderie to keep us going.

Well we kept going, all the way through Week 5, column three. Then I’m not sure what happened. IIRC I think we had a cold make the rounds through the house and knock us out for few days and then once we were out of the habit – well I’m sure you know how that goes.

Anyway, we’re start-up again, and we’d like to invite  CameraPlayForCouples.com readers to join us. HundredPushUps.com is a three day a week program, so we’ll be posting 100 push-updates (get it) on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Please to consider joining it. We’ll all get fit, strong and sexy together!