Photography

I haven't made much progress with the weight-loss:  not running has just not been any good for my waist-line.  I try to get out on the mountain bike for an hour every day and succeed about 4 to maybe 5 times per week.  While fun and certainly taxing on the legs, mountain biking is just not nearly as effective as keeping the pounds off, at least not for this individual.

Unfortunately the plantar fasciitis is still around.  It is not painful when waking up in the morning and doesn't present any real issues in just getting around.  So I can do all the routine things such as walking around, the grocery store, going to the movies, a sport event, or whatever.  As soon as I start to walk any longish distance - a half or mile or so - things change.   I  start to feel the stress on the leg and by the next morning there will be some low-level pain and disomfort.  Back where we started.

I am now really close to the point where I am going to seek out a surgeon to do endoscopic plantar fascia release.  Will give it another few weeks as I have an upcoming trip to Africa starting on May 21 and lasting until June 19.

Something that is going well is my photography, getting the 'hang' of my new Nikon D-4 camera.  Here are a couple of pics I took last week at the J Fred Duckett twilight event at Rice University. 

The lens I used was a Nikon 200-400 Zoom with 1.7 teleconverter. f/6.7, 1/3200 sec, ISO 3200. With my D-300 I might get 'lucky' and get a shot like this. With the D-4 firing at 9 frames per second there is (almost) no luck involved,  All you need is a good angle, some side-lighting and enough depth of field. It helps to be able to push the ISO and still get nice detail as is visible on the hair.