Well…it’s Labor Day here in the US of A so that means picnics and the like…but it’s really just too darned hot (92 and 70% humidity today) to do anything outside although Neil is planning on grilling our dinner (it’s halibut so it will cook pretty quickly after all) but hasn’t firmly decided yet. We’re also having some apple fruit salad but using balsamic vinaigrette instead of our normal mayo and we’ll add some chopped Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and whatever dried fruit Connie picks out to add and probably some nuts again of her choosing. We’ll bake a couple tater tots to go along with that and a nice bottle of chardonnay.

Nothing too much else new here…Connie has her post surgery visit with the surgeon’s PA tomorrow and then the radiation guy on Thursday. She’s still sore some and is really getting tired of it but is just taking Advil and only when Neil gripe at her about it. The pain level is more sore and tender than painful…but it wears on her and makes her cranky and since he’s the recipient of the crankiness he keeps getting her to go take something. She’s wearing the surgical bra they gave her at night and a non underwire type during the day as the wires press right on the bottom where the bruising is. The good news is that the bruising is starting to fade…it’s mostly just brown and yellow now and the dimple she had due to the swelling is pretty much gone.

One thing we think the surgeon should do differently…they should tell you that the first time you look at at post surgery which is 48 hours out…it’s gonna look terrible and you shouldn’t really take that to be anything like the final result. She had a really big depression on first look where they did the whole removal and reshaping thing but that’s because the rest of it swelled up and now that the swelling is mostly gone it’s pretty much not a problem. However…on her initial view…she was super unhappy about the way it looked.

She also needs a followup with the oncologist but he’s going to want to put her on hormone therapy for 5 years and that has significantly eye and GI tract side effects so she’s learning against doing that at this point…but hasn’t had all those conversations with the docs yet.

Neil’s been busy looking at all of his images and is following a different regimen this time. Past photo trips he pulled everything into Lightroom and then culled and processed but the reality is that when you shoot high speed (20 frames per second) bursts you get hundreds of almost identical shots that will never get a second look. That approach resulted in about 33K images he imported from Tanzania last year and about the same from Cost Rica…and true to form…especially since he used pre-capture that I’ll talk about when he actually processes some shots for me…he came home with about 45K images this time. 

His new workflow is to review all of them…he has a new mouse with a scroll wheel which is set to scroll rapidly through shots and he either Selects, Rejects, or ignores every image. Selects and Rejects go into a different folder and he’s been averaging about 3,000 to 4,000 shots per hour of culling and has been doing it for only an hour at a time to prevent eye burnout. As a result…he deleted about 4,000 and selected another 4,500 and the rest were left as non selects. For normal outings from now on…the non selects will just get deleted as well but he’s keeping them around for now since it’s sort of a bucket list kinda trip. He then imported those 4,500 into Lightroom and separated them by date for the trip and at this point will start doing processing and then blogging about the trip on a day by day basis. However…I did get him to process one quickly for me…this is from the first day on arrival in Kasane as they went to the hotel, dropped off the luggage and then immediately went out on a boat ride on the Chobe River.

The Pied Kingfisher is pretty big for the species…it’s about 9 inches long…which is a lot bigger than the Belted Kingfishers we have here. Later on he’s got several other types of them as well including both smaller and larger than the Pied. This one was taken with his 600mm lens from about 20ish feet and 1/4000 of a second shutter speed since kingfishers are really, really quick. He’s got about 100 shots of this individual and will process more of them later but I wanted to have something to show you to whet your appetite for the remainder. The other score for the first afternoon boat ride was a leopard but this was the one he gave me.

Interesting things found on the net.

Cyas.