I'd send the drive to Tallyn Photo in Peoria, IL and ask for a disk recovery quotation. Sometimes the issue is the circuitry outside the drive or in the drive enclosure and the data on the drive can be recovered with little effort. At other times the disks need to be scanned in a "clean room environment" and this can get expensive. In either case they'll give you a quotation and await an authorization. Sending a drive to Seagate- they may just replace your drive and do nothing to recover its contents.

A laptop will be about twice as expensive as an iMac. For the price of a 15" Mac Book Pro with Retina Display, loaded with memory you could have a 27" iMac. You'll ned external hard drives to supplement either one. You can add the memory to the iMac from OWC Computer or other sources at a better price than buying it from Apple too.

Even though TimeMachine does incremental backups, and can save accidentally lost data I'd look into Carbon Copy OR Super Duper to do a full bootable clone of your main drive onto an external. It can save lots of time if the drive dies. The $ version can be set for timed backups and is worth considering. As they say in Mac Group-it's not if your drive will fail, but when.

Any demo or open box product has to be sold as Refurbished, even if it has never been out of the box. If the box left the store and was returned the product can't be sold as new- even if unopened. This protects the consumer from possible tampering.
And no, the counter on a shutter is never set back- the only way it reads zero is if it is new or the shutter has been replaced.

If you are in one Catilog sorting and filing and then look into another, you will have closed out the first one and all the files in it in favor of the alternate one. This is an easy mistake to do when browsing for images-if you just click on a different Catilog you are in it and your previous choices are no longer available. Of course the actual images from all Catilogs are either on your main HD or your external, depending on how you set up your lightroom storage.

You'll want one external drive for storage of your original RAW images once entered into Lightroom. Either use "the cloud" or a second external for Time Machine. You still might want an off site storage for a copy of your original RAW files too. A Walcom tablet is the way to go for image manipulation. Go for PS Elements 11 instead of 10 if possible. Get a good UPS(uninterruptible power supply). Buy Scott Kelby's Lightroom 4 book and take his set up advice-especially on making a "MY LIGHTROOM" folder in PICTURES on the computer AND one on the external Photo hard drive.

For DX go for the 18 to 300; for FX the 28 to 300. Both are VR, modern design AF-S lenses that are great as a general purpose optic.

I have A Nikon D300 and a Canon S50. The Canon is one of the first point and shoots to produce a 5MP RAW file, in the CRW format. I use DNG so I can interchange files from both cameras. Users of Aperature, and some other software will find that CRW is no longer a supported format. Adobe supports more abandoned formats and allows conversion to DNG. That is enough to make it my choice.

Turn off the Autofocus- it'll always focus on the front row. Manually focus on the middle row and an aperture of f8 or f11 should do the trick, The rule of thumb is: everything 1/3 in front of and 2/3 behind your point of focus will be acceptably sharp.

I'm not sure about the camera you use, but with my Nikon D300 I can use "live view" and use the 3" high def screen to compose my image-no need to bring the camera up to one eye

Oh Dook, you are so wrong.
In the 1930"s a floor sweeper at the J.L.Hudson Department Store asked someone in the store's photo department if he could borrow a camera for a trip to his home town, Lynchburg,TN, Joe Clark was given a Box Brownie and 2 rolls of B&W film. When he returned they processed his film, took one look at his images and sent them to LIFE Magazine. They ran as a 5 page Spread! With training Joe became Joe Clark, H.B.S.S. (hill billy snap shooter). He was a well known Commercial Photographer with accounts like Jack Daniels and many other well known clients. Junebug Clark, his son, is also a Commercial Photographer.

How close do you need to get in magnification? Another option is a set of diopter close up lenses in the filter size to thread on your lens. You can usually find thin in the "used filter bin" at most large camera stores for under $10. They do not require any change in exposure- extension tubes do, as they change the overall length of the light path.
If you get extension tubes and have an auto focus lens be sure to buy the digital extension tubes that will maintain the electronic contacts for focus and metering-this should
compensate for exposure for you.

If they are for a trade show you need to know the color temperature of the lightbox so you can tell the lab how to balance the image. Many trade shows use Duratrans. a material processed in the same chemistry as color photo paper, but run at a slower processor speed- it has a white opaque backing and is made for backlit display work. There may also be transparent or opaque materials available in the inkjet printing market for display work. You still need to know the color temp of the illuminating backlight to properly print any of these materials.

Adobe developed the DNG, the universal RAW format that works across all platforms.I'm not sure if GIMP has access to this, but it is useful. In the last 15 years think of how many RAW formats are no longer supported by the original camera makers or other soft-ware makers. Adobe supports more than any other that I've found, and if you convert the files to DNG they can be shared between people with different camera platforms while maintaining metadata and other original information.

The 18 to 300 DX Nikon lens is fantastic. I bought one last August when they were released in the U.S. and mounted it on my D300.It performed flawlessly on our two week Mediteranian Cruise in September. The stabilization allows hand holding even in lower light conditions without added support. It also allows indoor photography in buildings like churches without flash. The lens is a bit heavy, but compared to the backpack of f2.8 optics I left at home it was a wonderful walkabout lens.