Faster shutter speed is needed to improve blurry images. Wide aperture (low #) lets in more light, allowing higher shutter speed. Higher ISO can make more noise (grainier), but also allows faster shutter. Yellow cast indicates an improper white balance setting. IS should be off if on a tripod, on if hand held. If you are using IS, it allows a slower shutter speed, which may allow you to lower ISO and avoid noise. You may need to experiment a bit, if not in the gym, in another low light setting, to find the best balance. Good Luck!

Your question is a bit unclear. Do you want a lens to shoot macro, i.e. the ability to get physically close to your subject, or do you want a lens that zooms in close from a distance?

Ditto what Adubin says. I use LR3 for crop, lighting adjust, color adjust, sharpness adjust, in short all but complex alterations, e.g. changing background or removing power lines, on which CS5 does an incredible job. You should also try the 30 day free CS5.

I think this is the cause of the problem. Thanks again.

Could some of the shots you have seen been taken in a lightbox with a grey or black background? I frequently use one for close ups of flowers.

Thanks to one and all... so far, the right-click and 'find missing folder' solution has been the most effective. Though, for whatever it's worth, I still question how the link was corrupted. I never moved the files and, to the best of my knowledge, the drive name was never changed. Can this occur spontaneously without provocation???

In some instances you may want to prevent theft. For instance, most of my photos are used on our website to showcase our wedding flower design. There have been some cases where we have found other companies using our images on their websites, and claiming the arrangements as their work. Of course, unless you use a semi-transparent watermark across the middle of your images, anyone with editing capabilities can crop your watermark off the image anyway.

Interesting... now if only I could remember! It is quite possible the letter was changed, though I cannot be sure, as I am frequently connecting a second and third hard drive (from my other laptop) and copying folders for backup. In the interim, I did attempt to re-import one folder to LR, and that procedure seems to have succeeded. I'm not looking forward to re-importing all my 2011 shoots, but fortunately there was never any risk of losing originals. Things could be worse, I guess.

Thanks, Richard. I will give re-importing a try. If all else fails, LR support will be my next stop!

They have not been moved from their original location. I am able to access them independent of Lightroom. The entire catalogue of images stored on the hard drive- other than the two shoots from yesterday- are not recognized by LR. If all went missing, I would suspect the hard drive. In fact, until yesterday, only about 50% "could not be found". Now it's grown to all but the last 2 folders.

I have an ongoing problem with LR3 which has recently escalated. It does not recognize several folders in my external hard drives. It did initially, but now when I try to reopen folders to edit, a "?" appears next to the folder, and the images appear along with a message that it "cannot be found". The situation has grown from several folders to all but the most recent. Sound familiar to anyone?