Hi Everyone,
Just a quickie. I’ve just been diagnosed with a raging case of tennis elbow. The physio said that often he can just recommend people stop doing the activity that exacerbates it, but since essentially every aspect of my job (holding a camera, especially on a wrist strap, typing, mouse, moving kit around) exacerbates it, that won’t be practical. So I’m going to have to work on it with exercises, wrist supports on shoot days and for computer work, etc..
I will be trying to reduce impact. So using light cameras on a neck strap rather than the Hasselblad or RED for shoots for the next few months, trying to organise shoot days so I do less moving of kit by shooting more sets in each room before we move, and trying to reduce my time in front of the computer to the bare minimum to get by. I’ll be switching to dictation software for as much typing as possible, too.
I don’t think it should impact the functioning of the site in any major way. But… my customer service emails might get very curt for a while, the stories might be a bit briefer (and possibly more surreal if I don’t catch errors from the dictation software). If it goes on for too long or gets too bad, I might also cut back on the amount of fine detail retouching I do on photosets and rely on the automatic parts of the software until I’ve recovered. I hope you won’t notice much difference, but if you do, please bear with me until I recover. Thanks!
Cheers, Hywel
Hi, right-sided tennis elbow struck me 4 years ago.
My advice, which makes the elbow problem vanish within a day:
Start using the mouse with your left hand ! After a couple of hours of traning you will be able to use your computer without any problems.
I even don’t change the mouse settings to “left-handed” – I use my left middle finger for left-click.
Sadly, it’s not just using the mouse. Keyboard, graphics tablet pen also do it, but so do holding a camera, using a screwdriver, carrying anything, and going for a walk. I’m doing some things left-handed, but I can feel the first beginnings of it on my left side as well and I want to avoid that! So I’m concentrating on minimising time spent doing these things, and doing the physio exercises.
I have just joined, hence my belated response. First, greetings to a fellow physicist; we have been capturing the fleeting moment ever since Wilson invented the cloud chamber. Now we photograph the cosmos in fifty shades of infra-red.
But I digress. My GP cured my tennis elbow with a shot of cortisone into the tendon. Not all GP’s can do this but I suggest you enquire. It is now over twenty years since I was treated and I have had no further problem.
I hope you recover soon and that it isn’t too serious!