A monopod can easily be jarred or moved slightly and is not rock solid because of the human element, so I'd leave it on. I once saw a documentary where they video'd a person standing as still as possible and then played it back in fast motion. The human body actually sways in all directions slightly while supposedly standing still because your equilibrium requires testing and slightly readjusting your position all the time so you don't fall in any direction. So if you think you're standing absolutely still with a monopod and you are two legs of a tripod shape while the monopod is the third, you're mistaken - unless you have your back pressed against a wall or other hard object. Even then you have muscle movements in your arms and fingers holding the camera and pressing the shutter button.

They should be specifying inches and PPI, not DPI. Sad that somebody running a competition doesn't know that. 300PPI pretty much guarantees that a really nice print can always be made out of the file because printers vary in how much information they need to create the best print they can. Some printers print at 180DPI, some at 240DPI, and many commercial shops are higher than that. Most consumer printers don't print at 300DPI but you never know what printer is going to print that 300PPI file in the future.

You need to crop the file to 4X5 first, then save it as a 1200X1500PPI resolution (4X300PPI and 5X300PPI) to give them what they need. You or they can then print it on virtually anything at 4X5 inches and it will be wonderful. I personally would keep an 8X10 version at 2400X3000 as well so you can print a larger one to frame if she wins!

And true, there is no direct correlation between PPI and DPI. PPI is file resolution, DPI is dots of ink per inch. PPI can be afixed by you, but DPI will vary from printer to printer.

I'd use the 50mm f1.8 to have maximum light and a nicely blurred background which also allows a higher shutter speed to freeze any subject movement which may be minor but enough to ruin a perfectly good shot. The rule of thumb in the film SLR days was 70mm to 135mm for portraits. In the crop sensor dSLR world that can easily be handled by a 50mm lens. Just move in closer or out to make your compositions. Whether indoor or out, use flash with a diffuser on it. Indoor use ISO 400 or higher which allows more ambient light and not as much flash is required. Point it upward if it's a low ceiling or at a 45 degree angle if it's a high ceiling For outdoors you'll set the amount of flash (in your camera body) for just fill flash. It takes shadows out of their faces and balances light behind them with flash in front of them. It also creates a separation of the subjects from the background. You might want to practice with that method before the event. With on-camera fill flash you don't need reflectors unless you're looking for dramatic effects. You describe this is taking portraits but I feel you're actually going to be shooting a party with some relatives and 16 year old friends there and that's not really portraiture unless you set up a location with lights and such for all subjects to come to your setup.

Okay, I give up. What is your point? Imagination on who's part? Reasoning of what versus what? There are statistics to prove full-frame has less noise and most times an experienced eye can see when something has been taken with a full-frame body. Yet technology has improved vastly over the last 5 years and the differences are less and less every year.

Well, for not wanting to confuse the OP any more, you're doing a good job of it. An SSD, not a SDD, is a solid state drive that has no moving parts. It's much faster than a normal platter type spinning hard drive. SSDs are still too expensive to put one for apps and OS, and a second huge one for data you have created. The OP said the PC has both drives so it has a smaller SSD and a much larger spinning HD both inside it. It is not an internal and an external drive.

The answer to the original question is that the operating system and applications go on the SSD so they are very fast to load. Any data you create, whether it's photos or Word documents or spreadsheets or whatever are supposed to go on the slower old-school spinning hard drive.

The reason is that most applications and the operating system spend most of their time being READ and not written to - unless there is an update, upgrade, or configuration change (such as the workspace of Photoshop or LR is altered and saved). Documents you create are written to a spinning hard drive storage space, read from that space, saved back onto the drive in another space, and over and over. All that reading and writing can cause corruption, can cause lost data, cause sectors to get corrupted, etc.

If your operating system and applications aren't on that drive and are sitting elsewhere on the SSD, they ar much safer from being harmed by writing errors or other corruption, and thus your system should remain fast and mostly error free compared to jamming everything onto one drive. Booting from an SSD can be almost instantaneous. Firing up an application can be almost instantaneous from an SSD. Booting from a spinning disk may take a whole minute or two. So there is a big difference to take advantage of. But putting your data, photos, and text on your SSD ruins the whole concept of what it's for.

And extremely talented in other fields of music. Tony Bennett doesn't do duo albums with just anybody. I am repulsed by her "pop" image and "pop" music but her other stuff is pretty amazing.

Another excellent singer who is very overlooked is Cindi Lauper. She's done big band and latin albums that weren't "hit" material but just something she wanted to do and they were excellent.

School kids do it all the time. Apple gives school systems hot deals on setting up Mac computer labs so the teachers gets free notebooks and iPads, administration members get free notebooks or iPads, everybody involved in decision making gets "bought" by Apple (can you say "payola" like what became illegal in the music industry?) to assure that the computer lab is Mac. Then the teachers who would never spend what it takes to buy an overpriced Mac all become Apple Zombies because they have been handed one free. What do you suppose is behind this new movement for whole schools being supplied with iPads for every single student? More payola, of course.

It happens everywhere. The school system where I lived in MI did it too. They had a new lab built for $40,000 that included 20 mediocre-powered Macs with them all networked together. I calculated the same lab could have been done for less than $20,000 if PCs were used. There wasn't even a bidding war to get the gig. Bought and paid for administrators and teachers decided it was going to be Mac and there was only one Apple dealer in the area. Apple it was!

So kids work on Mac computers and iPads until graduation then trip and fall on their faces when they find out that 85+% of the world uses PCs and any job they're likely to get will be using PCs (typically lots of Dell or Lenovo) for virtually everything from corporate servers right down to their Windows office workstation that greets them on the first day in their real world work.

Otherwise you'll never hear of anybody who switches from Apple to PC or will admit that they did.

As Whuff said, you can't related megapixels of data to megabytes of file size.

Megapixels is the number of pixels in the photo. If your sensor is a 20MP sensor then the file will have close to 20 million pixels inside of it.

Megabytes is the size of the file (whether it's a photo, an Acrobat PDF file, an .exe application, or a Word document) as it's being recorded onto the memory card. The memory card doesn't even pay attention to what's inside the file, just that it's a certain megabyte in size.

The chart in the manual is just a guess-timate as to how many you can shoot. Also don't forget that when shooting RAW the camera is recording the big file you shot plus it's recording a thumbnail view of it for you to see in the viewfinder. You may also be shooting in RAW+JPG and putting twice as many files on your SD card as you think you are (a big RAW in MB and a smaller JPG plus a thumbnail JPG that is quite small).

Put the memory card into your computer and look at the content of the card with your File Manager, Windows Explorer, or whatever your computer calls it. You will see the details of the physical size of each shot you took.

Crop sensor means the sensor is smaller than a full-frame sensor. It also has an output frame that is smaller. So there's no magnification going on to fill a full-frame. A diagram of sensor sizes from smallest to full-frame has been uploaded on here many, many times. If someone has that available, please submit it for this thread author.

Yes, just because I spent $899 for mine doesn't mean you have to. I do this professionally and need power and to get projects done fast. Two processes I do are bulk processes that the machine does by itself while I'm away from it. I want those to happen quickly.

A newest generation i5 CPU is probably faster than an older i7, so that saves quite a bit. 8GB of memory is adequate for most people so that saves quite a bit. A 1TB drive is cheaper than a 1.5TB or 2TB so that would save money too. I suppose a pretty decent machine could be had for $600 - although it should definitely have a graphics accelerator separate video card with at least 1GB of VRAM and definitely not onboard Intel video.

Even if you considered a $1000 unit though, it's going to last you for a good six years or more of personal use unless you have a hole burning in the bottom of your money pocket and you are a technology junkie. My other i7 is 5 years old. It was $899 when I got it and that divides into let's say $175 a year in value if it was dead today but it's not. And that's after I've punished it profusely over the last 3 years processing hundreds of photos per day. I continue to use it for personal stuff and expect it to continue running the same for several more years. I can, as I've said in other posts about other stuff, skip one McDonald's run per week and buy a fast computer instead, if I have my priorities straight. Some people smoke $50 - 100 a week and complain about buying a new computer. Some people drink $100 a week in beer. It's just a matter of what's important to you in your life and how it fits into your family budget.

Go on vacation for a couple days? Take a 24 hour nap? Feel confident that your upgrade isn't going to work correctly and start worrying now?

Android? That's going from the gutter into the sewer system. My Android tablet locks often and I have to restart it. My Android phone acts goofy whenever it wants to for no reason. And Android apps are complete jokes which isn't so bad when they're free.

They might work well but I certainly hope you're not trying to run Photoshop on this. 4GB RAM and 160GB drive? Come on... I take 5GB of photos per day. Subtract the space used by the OS and added software and how much storage is really available?

I agree on OS/2. It was fast, easy to work with, did true multi-tasking in separate windows so they didn't crash each other, and I felt good using it and sticking it to Microsoft. I had hopes for it to become THE OS for everyone and was stunned when suddenly it became a pretty much worthless shell around a copy of real Windows 95 which was a total abortion. Then it was gone completely. Sad...

PS needs CPU speed, a quad core CPU, and lots of RAM memory to operate well. I have an i7 that's about 5 years old, 8GB RAM, and an accelerated graphics card with 1GB of video RAM. PS, especially the Bridge module, was okay on that but the waiting for it to work started boring me to death because I'm on it 4 hours a day every day. 5 weeks ago I bought a new 6th Generation much faster i7, 16GB of RAM, an accelerated graphics card with 2GB of video RAM, etc. and that improved PS by at least 30%.

If you truly want to bring your whole dinner and a quart of drink on a card table to sit next to your old PC that isn't running at least Win7 and 8GB of RAM, so you can slowly edit a half dozen huge RAW files as you eat, go for it! Otherwise, stick to LR. It's smaller, isn't layer-based, and LR's librarian is faster than PS's Bridge because it works in a different way.