Thanks guys I appreciate all the input, My camera is relatively heavy so I guess if its heavier than the lens it makes more sense to hang the lens from the camera rather than the other way round.

I did see a modified off flash bracket used to support the lens which might be an idea with some macro work.

I was watching a video last night and in it. It was said that a long lens should be mounted on the tripod rather than the camera.

The reason being that the weight of a long lens could distort the camera body.

That actually asks more questions than it answers. What is a long lens, my longest lens is a 75-300mm sigma which I sometimes use with a tele-converter does that need mounting from the lens?

Non of my lenses have any obvious mounting points, so are they fine with just attaching to the camera and attaching the camera to the tripod?

reworked to give better eyes but it doesn't have the same look. It might be preferable thou.

I will have to have another go at the first one, a friend just called it creepy and I think that is probably due to the eyes. I don't think I would have put a picture of her up if it had been recognisable. I was thinking on the lines of an art deco silver statue. Will be interesting to see other view points her mum loves it.

I think stans expression made me want to process it this way. thank you for your thoughts they are very encouraging.

i wonder what you make of these 2 quite different shots, both quite processed in the gimp and ufraw. The girl i wanted to process out all background distractions, its quite a long way from reality but i think its striking. The other is my father in-law. I was aiming for an emotional gritty film noir feel. I sharpened and resharpened and set the black and white levels to try and boost the contrast. So what do you think. Both shot on a Pentax k200d with the samsung 18-55mm kit lens and a manual flash mounted on the hot shoe.

well here are 2 jpgs with and without the teleconverter and as rendered by the camera, iso 100 1/500th at f11 renders black for me

This was my attempt it's cropped down. iso 100 f5.6 1/125th sec
used a 300mm manual sigma with a 2x teleconverter and it was still about a stop under. I think the teleconverter makes the f-stop effectively f11. It was just after midnight on a tripod and the moon was very high in the sky.

Apart from use a longer lens and a tripod, the obvious fact (which isn't obvious because we are in the dark) is that it is sunny on the moon! big aperture, long exposure is going to give a white spot. Thanks to this thread I learned.

Currently there is Comet Ison speeding towards the sun and in theory visible to the naked eye in the east about an hour before dawn.

Any suggestions for capturing the comet?

There were enthusiastic predictions of it being brighter than the moon in magnitude but I think it will be less. It's fairly small in size a bit less than a mile across and may break up.

The eyefi option had me all excited but after a bit of background reading deflated.

The near ideal solution would be take a picture upload to tablet tag it with the gps position after all it shouldn't take long (even better sync the time stamps of the photo with the gps position of the tablet at the time the picture was taken) back up photo's on the tablet to picasa or similar when internet connectivity is available.

reality the mobi version only transfers the jpeg files not the raw gps service isn't its wifi locations using found wifi points to triangulate and thats on android and not ipad.

There may be other apps that will work with the cards but it looks like I don't want an eyefi card for xmas anymore.

Although it is quite a tidy option for doing the transfer between camera to tablet.
It seems a bit brain dead that the eyefi app can't use the freely available gps signal but then they charge for the wps service (first 12 months free).

Hi Esther while what you say is true, the original poster was looking at travelling light with a tablet in the computer role. If the computer was available on the trip there would be no need for the tablet.

I'm not convinced there are enough high quality tools available on a tablet to make it a viable alternative to a computer. Possibly a chromebook might be an option but then your not as portable as a tablet. Chromebooks can dual boot with linux which does have good tools for working with photographs but that is not that simple an option either.

The other problem is colour calibrated screens. The main problem with most computer screens is they do not give a true colour picture. which leads to a photograph which looks good on one screen may look completely wrong on another. That may not bother some people but i hate it when it happens with mine and i haven't the money for a calibration tool either... I think my main aim would be to try to ensure a secure backup and worry about editing when i'm back home, it'd be nice to post a few pictures to make a few friends envious too :). A tablet could do that and more, helping with translation too, having some good books to read access to your favourite websites gps mapping too. Blogging your trip is another possible. It all depends on your requirements really. Not all tablets have gps or card slots or any method of connecting any storage to them without a computer being involved. So even if you decide yes a tablet could be useful, its another battle to find one which has the features you desire.

Tablets have some positives and at least one big negative.

I'll talk about the negative first limited storage space. I've taken 6Gb of photographs in 6 hours that is a lot of space on a tablet. How much card space would you use?

However some of the advantages are it can be used to view and review photographs. If you take a picture with a tablet or a smart phone it can tag with gps coordinates. Which could be quite useful.

Storage most android tablets support USB host mode. either with a microusb port that supports a cable with a regular usb port on the end some also have full size usb ports too.
A regular USB external hard drive can be used if it has its own psu (but don't drop it). Sometimes you can even have a usb hub, my old tablet supports some powered usb hubs (1 of about 8 i have works) Flash drives could be a reasonable option for backup 64gb / 128gb drives are available at a reasonable price.

most android devices will allow a micro sd card to be plugged in. A simple card adapter would allow it to be used in your camera.

Online backups Many sites will store photo's for you but many compress the goodness out of them. Facebook for example will turn your image into a 67KB file from a 4MB+ image. If you'd rather not publish your pictures you could buy some web hosting a shared host can give you 25gb of space which you could administer/ upload to from anywhere (easy to find for less than €50 a year). With a decent wifi connection you could be backing up in all manner of places.

Apps there are a few good tools out there. Depth of field calculators for example amongst others.

On the other hand a usb card reader could be yours for a couple of euro/dollars/pounds and an internet cafe could give you most of the same facilities and GPS tagged Photographs and utilities would work on a smart phone.