No matter what you buy, be careful to keep a close eye on your stuff. I keep a lot of my stuff in several backpacks in the trunk of my car. I keep the latch in the cars interior locked so you can't easily break into the trunk. If I'm doing a special shoot, I pick the size backpack I need and arrange the dividers and stock it with the equipment. I live on the west coast we don't get nasty weather that might fog, mould, or get my equipment damp while it's in the trunk. I also keep a foldable dolly in my car in case I have to bring a lot of equipment to the shoot. I read that one guy fills his to a 45lb capacity. No way I can carry that for any distance so I use the dolly. Don't trust anyone with your equipment. I've heard horror stories about photographers asking the wedding party for a lockable secure room to keep their equipment just to have the room broken into and all their equipment stollen.

This is very interesting. I almost posted a simular question the other day. I was editing a RAW in PS CS5 RAW editor, and the last thing I did was crop the image then open it in CS5. I made further adjustments and saved as a jpg to send to a friend. I closed everything and later went to open that same RAW file. When opened in th CS5 RAW editor the image was not looking like the original, but had all the effects I previously made including the crop. I found out I could got back to the original size by going back to the crop feature and then it showed the crop maquee and I then removed it and the pic was back to original size. But now I see that instead it would be easier to delete the file accompanying the RAW to get rid of the saved edit. Thanks

Keeping the copyrights isn't so much about keeping someone else from printing and using the shots as it is giving the photographer the rights to use the photos as they see fit - i.e. web site, portfolio, advertising etc. Imagine if you had a nice web site advertising your wedding photography business and your site has some nice photos of different weddings you've done. If someone decides to take you to court over some of those photos and you don't have the rights to them things could get sticky. That's why you sell the photos, the prints, the album etc., but never the rights to the photos you took.

I purchased a 1 megapixel point & shoot many years ago from BB. I purchased the warranty. (point and shoots were expensive back then) The camera was almost 3 years old when it started locking up. I took it back to BB. They had it repaired and mailed back to me. This happened 3 times in succession and on the third time they gave me store credit to buy anything I wanted. By that time technology improved by leaps and bounds and I got a 4 or 5 megapixel P&S that was half as big for the store credit. They also wanted me to re-purchase a new warranty for the camera. I didn't do it. I still have the camera and it's screen is doing weird things but it's old now. I got a friend that took his Canon P&S to Canon in Irvine CA and they mailed a better camera back to him free because they didn't have parts to fix the other camera. I could do this too, but my wife purchased a new P&S for me 2 Christmas's ago and it works fine.

If the RAW file does have a jpg thumbnail imbedded in it, it will be of thumbnail quality, without enough pixels to enlarge and will be useless. That said, the thumbnail you speak of will use the cameras settings for jpg finished files, but again it will not have enough pixels to be of any use other than a thumbnail.

Certain programs will create a thumbnail from the RAW file. When I download the cameras memory card using PSE9, the Organizer creates a thumbnail from the RAW data. It can create a thumbnail as large as 1024x768 but all you can do with the thumbnail for editing purposes is do a screen capture - and that will not have enough data to make decent prints from. Also, the thumbnail will look exactly like the RAW image, not the cameras enhanced jpg. You can see a definate difference.

This thread was started yesterday the 18th and I believe she said the party is Sunday (tomorrow).

She is going to a roller skating rink and it's got a wood floor. . . . but the rentals are a good idea already mentioned several times in this thread.

Wow, this thread really went viral. Did anyone mention the nifty 50 lens? Anyway Shannon, the Canon EF50mm f/1.8 lens sells for about $110 new and is a very fast lens for such a low price. I've heard a lot of good things about this very inexpensive lens. You might want to consider getting this lens for those low light situations and a 430 or 580 ex strobe. I don't know where you live but a lot of camera stores near me rent such equipment too. If you ask for enough pay to cover the expense of renting you'll be all set. That way you can try before you buy :)

Maybe all professional images should include pre-processed files with the Metadata in tact. Maybe this kind of proof should be provided before "awards" are granted to the recipients.

I know that in Nascar, after each race the winning car is checked by Nascar officials to make sure that the car is legal. If they find out that the car altered in any way not authorized by Nascar, the driver will go from being first to last; the crew chief will be fined thousands of dollars and be suspended for at least 3 races; and on top of that, it is publicized and they are known as cheaters.

I don't know for certain if image files can be altered and the data kept in tact. If it can, then the photographer would certainly have to be a good photographer, a good post processor and a computer programming expert. If a person is that smart, then maybe they deserve to win.

At least we know now that once someone is caught cheating, it is usually publicized on the internet. It's easy to look someone up on the net and see their record. I don't think Terje Helloso will be able to repair his reputation now that it's all over the WWW.

It strikes me odd that a grown person has the time to write such a wish list, with pictures, like a 5 year old would make a list for Santa. Just work, save money, and buy it. That would be the grown up thing to do but then could we count on you to not brag about it. Probably not.

I second this advice. My T2I came with the 18-135 and I used this for a long time until I bought a used 24-70mm L series lens. If you are doing mostly portraits I would recommend using a flash and tripod.

This thread is about photography! It's about photographers rights! It's just one thread of many so it's like watching something on TV. If you don't like what is on one channel, just change the channel. No big deal.

That's what I'm talking about.

TKH - I'm not sure who you are disagreeing with. Are you saying that Picasa is steeling pics from people that post them on there web site? or are you saying that Picasa sells work from their site that is of low, 72dpi, quality?

If you post your pics on the web, just use low quality images at 72dpi. They can use the images for use on the web again, but the quality will be so low that they couldn't use them in any publications. I hate those watermarks that run across the entire pic. I wish they would just put it out of the way somewhere on the pic. My camera also puts my name and copyright info on the EXIF or Metadata. But that information can be removed with software too.