You may want to buy a copy of Fine Art Printing for Photographers by Uwe Steinmueller and Juergen Gulbins, available at Amazon. It will tell you everything you want to know about printing and will pay for itself. It does get pretty technical at times, but it provides a wealth of information about color management, printers, inks, ICC profiles, printing software, different brands and types of papers—and which ones go with which printers & inks, etc.

Calibrating your monitor is a must for accurate printing. I use the Color Munki/Display, which is fast and easy to use.

I store my photos on an external hard drive, but after I got the Nikon D800 (large RAW files), I bought a Drobo RAID system. The RAID unit backs itself up, and if one of its hard drives fails, it always reserves enough room for you to safely replace the drive without consequences.

RAID units aren't cheap, but they're reliable (as reliable as anything can be in this arena).

Yes.

Photoshop CC, Photoshop CS6, Photoshop Elements 12, NIK/Google Collection, and other plug-ins.

I would use the Content Aware feature in the Healing tool to remove those headless people. (It's almost magical!) Both Adobe Photoshop CS6/CC and Photoshop Elements 12 have the Content Aware tool. I doubt if GIMP has it because it's probably an Adobe exclusive. Also, GIMP is very difficult to learn and slightly maddening.

I second the suggestion to get the Photoshop/Lightroom CC for $10 per month, or get PSE 12 for around $70.

I've used Photoshop for decades, but it's vast and has a steep learning curve, so it's not for everyone. I've always included a Photoshop mini-seminar in my Photojournalism class, but a single day just isn't enough time to learn the basics of Photoshop. So this year I scoured UHH for suggestions on a simpler but effective photo-editing app. (Maybe it's just me, but I found GIMP much more difficult to master than Photoshop and less intuitive.) Eventually it came down to either Lightroom or Elements 12.

Lightroom is a great software, but it's not that easy to learn for a short seminar, so I decided on Elements, which can do many of the same things as its elder sibling Photoshop. It's cheap (I've seen it for as low as $65.), and it's fun. It has three levels of expertise, and even "Advanced" is not that difficult to master. I edited some of my photos with it and was pleased with the results. Elements now includes Layers, which is a sophisticated tool.

For anyone interested in learning Photoshop, I highly recommend getting Adobe Photoshop Classroom in a Book. It includes a CD with fun exercises for each chapter. By the time you finish the book, you will have used just about every feature in the software.

Glad to be of service. There are no guarantees in this world, but I feel pretty confident recommending this particular lens because I've used it so many times. Happy shooting . . .

Several years ago, I encountered the closeup work of Karin Connolly Daley and then visited her website. Her celestial flower photos so enthralled me that I emailed her and asked what lens she was using. She wrote back that she used the Tamron Macro 180. I ordered one that very day! As luck would have it, Tamron was offering a rebate on the lens, and I saved $100. In many ways, it's my favorite lens. I had been using a Nikon Micro 60 (which I still own), and when I compared the two, the 180 easily won with its stunningly rich, soft bokeh. I also highly recommend Karin's book: "Flower Reflections." I've taken thousands of flower photos with this lens, and I'm still excited about it. (No, I don't work for Tamron.)

I tried Gimp and didn't like it — in fact, I loathed it — so awkward and, well, gimpy. I prefer any of the commercial photo applications to it, and besides Photoshop 5.5, I own Light Room, DXO Pro, Aperture, and the NIK suite. On the other hand, if you like Gimp, that's great. It depends on your needs really. My friend has his graphics students use Gimp, and they can do more with it than I can with Photoshop. So it all depends on your finances, needs, and tolerances. But if you can afford it, I would say go with Photoshop because it's a very deep program and will do everything but your dishes!

I learned Photoshop by using Adobe's Photoshop Classroom in a Book. The reason this is superior to Scott Kelby and the rest of the books is that it includes a CD containing specific lessons to work on. It's completely systematic; you begin at the most basic level and build on each previous lesson, and the lessons are enjoyable. I might also add that the you can buy used copies on Amazon. Even if the CD has been lost, you can download it for free from the Adobe site.

It depends on your standards. In any case, if you want or need a compact camera for the convenience it affords, some are better than others. The ones I mentioned — the Lumix LX-5 and Canon S95 — are the top of the line in their class.

I wanted to get the best quality point and shoot to take to Europe with me this summer, and I researched this for weeks and read all the comparisons. It always came down to the Lumix LX-5 and the Canon S95. I finally chose the Lumix and absolutely love it. Panasonic partnered with Leica on that camera, and, while the Panasonic version currently sells for around $350, the Leica is nearly identical for about twice the cost.
Over the holidays I received an incredible offer from Amazon's Deal of the Day on the Canon S95, so I bought one and had it converted to infrared to carry in my pocket while shooting with my much larger Nikon D300. Yes, I am a Nikon man, but in my opinion the Nikon point and shoots don't measure up to the Canons and Panasonics.
I might add that the S95 is much slower than the LX-5, and its battery has a much lower capacity. The main problem with the LX-5 is that it has too much depth of field and is not as easy as the S95 to get a blurred background. Otherwise, they seem pretty equal. The S95 is about $20 cheaper if that's important to you.

I loved film when film was king. My first camera was a Nikon FM with so many light leaks I had to tape it up every time I changed film. And I took some of my best photos with it. The most valuable thing about that camera was that it had no automatic functions, so I had to teach myself how to shoot manually (plus I read a lot of books).

But that era has passed, and I don't miss it. However, I do miss the manual cameras that film engendered. I love digital, but everything is so automatic that new photographers may not get the opportunity to shoot manually and learn its deep lessons. When I teach poetry, I always begin with a sonnet, and I don't allow the students to write free verse until they've mastered meter and rhyme. I do the same in my photography classes: the students aren't allowed to touch any automatic functions for the first couple of weeks.

I know this thread is about film, and I've digressed into cameras, but since the two are related, I just wanted to say what I thought was most valuable about the film era.

Cheers,

Jim

Jim, sorry for such a long post on your thread :oops:[/quote]

No problem. I always enjoy learning more about infrared photography.

For me, digital infrared has been a godsend. I still have a couple of rolls of infrared film in my freezer that I never got around to using. I just couldn't bring myself to go through the whole darkroom/changing bag ritual, but I was fascinated with infrared and wanted to try it. Then I read about the fuji infrared camera (based on a Nikon DSLR as I remember) and contemplated buying one.

Not long after that, I learned that Tony Sweet uses an infrared camera converted by Life Pixel. I immediately sent my Nikon D80 to Life Pixel and have been very happy with the results, even though the conversion cost around $500. These days, competition has reduced conversion costs to about half that amount. Life Pixel doesn't do point-and-shoot conversions, so I sent my new Canon S95 to Spencer's Camera, which comes highly recommended. After I shoot with it, I'll give a report.

In the meantime, I'm attaching a photo I took with my D80 of a house in Fort Hamilton, Iowa.

Thanks.

Jim

Lovely photo. It looks like something out of Hansel and Gretel. I've read there are focusing problems with using a filter because you can't actually see the object through the dark filter. Is this correct?