Tonight we got massages after dinner because it has been a while since our last session. And admittedly my arm has been feeling a little sore. Maybe I just slept on it wrong. Maybe it's all the photos and videos I take whenever we go to O Bar. It's probably a mix of both things.
A typical O Bar night includes between 25-30 performances - depending on how you count. I used to try to cut videos per song, but a lot of times they do medleys and mashups that you really can't split up. In recent years, I've committed to recording every single performance to the best of my ability as long as my phone has sufficient storage capacity and battery. At the same time, I snap around 2,000 photos per night including many shots while I'm recording video. Thus for most of the night, while the show is active, I have my arms up as I document all the magic that happens on stage.
I don't quite know how I reached a point where I'm physically capable of doing this. To be fair, our regular table is right up front, so I no longer have to deal with other people obstructing my view. We used to get a table at the back that was great because it was dead center but it was a challenge because there were still several tables in front of us and so I had to hold my phone above the heads of those in front of me in order to get this captured. And I'm not exactly a tall person.
Before I used to pick and choose which numbers I'd record based on whether I knew what song was coming up or if it was a new number. But when any of the performers would message me after and ask if I had a recording of their performance, it kind of broke my heart in the times I'd have to say no. So that explains what motivates me to do this so diligently - but I don't know how my arm caught up. Or maybe this is a longer-term benefit of my fairly regular yoga practice at home - downward dog and vinyasa flows do provide good stretching and some degree of strength-building.
I guess I've just trained myself to keep up the camera work all night. If professional photographers can do similar work during weddings and related events with a DSLR, I should be able to manage it with a phone. I have my own tips and tricks for capturing stuff and I can even sneak in drinks while filming. I know I won't always have perfectly steady video as I'm not using a tripod or a gimbal, but that's part of the charm of what I do I guess.
Because of different events, November has become a month where we're guaranteed to be at O Bar at least once every week. Thus far, we've had instances when we've gone more than once because it's just fun to do so and see the performers on different nights. Thus I've been aggressively trying to keep pace with my media queue and hoping that my arm doesn't give up on me during this time. Plus, December is O Bar's anniversary month, which will mean even more reasons to go, thus more videos to record, upload, and process.
So yeah, massages are a necessary coping mechanism for as long as I continue to try to do this for our O family. I know I can't keep this up indefinitely, but I'll keep pushing as long as I can.
And don't even get me started on how much we're paying for Google storage to deal with my Google Photos backups. 😅
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