Yow, perhaps I'm a little slow but you're a funny dude once a person gets past the initial irritation! "plus a large steaming heap of..." I've got a lot of places I can/will use that. Thanks, but don't expect credit each use.

Thank you, joecichjr

Hi Tea8. Yep, I'm still around, sometimes. I've seen you pop in and out on occasion. Nice to see you. As for following me on Instagram, if you want to waste your time like that, I am gessmansr1. I just dusted off a few shots and put them on there to establish a presence and haven't added any to them since opening - not sure when that was even. I hope to start contributing more soon but unfortunately, I sense that my best days have slipped by me already without me taking advantage of them. Plus, with all the social upheaval, it's been real hard for me to get motivated. I'm so disenchanted that some days I feel more like being out shooting with an AK-47.

Would you be interested in revealing your Instagram username, if not openly, in a PM? I would be interested in "following" you.

Now, I may be a bit short-sighted, but observing and comparing images here in uhh, in Instagram, and in several wildlife groups in Facebook, the photographers who seem to be producing the best images consistently on a daily basis, as I see it, are relatively inexperienced females using this lens and either an d850 or a d500. Since I'm loaded with Canon and Sony gear and getting on the short end of my remaining useful life expectancy in this subject, given that so many of the experts here would have us believe that it is not the equipment but the user, I've been contemplating the idea of, instead of camo, getting myself a mini-skirt, a halter top, and maybe a wig to fool the wildlife into thinking I'm female. What do you think? I've been also thinking about snapping my fingers while making a circle with my hand but since that has only been shown to keep elephants away, it looks like a mini-skirt is my best bet since it is a wee bit too expensive to move back to Nikon just to get pictures of a sparrow or a dog-eared deer.

HERE IS AN INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEO FROM ADORAMA TV THAT INVOLVES THE SUBJECT OF THIS THREAD. SOME OF YOU WITH
ABSOLUTE OPINIONS COULD STAND TO WATCH IT:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBF1i8t8Skw

This looks like another good place to drop this url:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBF1i8t8Skw

Sounds like you're having pickled turkey or your turkey is having pickled usnpilot.

It probably matters little at this point but if you would hit the "quote reply" button rather than the "reply" button the person's post to whom you direct your comments would be noted above your comment and it would let us know to whom you were addressing your remarks. It would be appreciated if you would do that and your comment would be more relevant and make more sense.

Just in case you were intending your comment to my post just above yours, I would just say that I have installed Luminar 3 and 4 on multiple very worthy machines running different versions of Windows and it fouls out more often than not, some at the splash screen and in others, it appears to install but then cannot find its database. At the very least, more often than not, it is a shabby incomplete install process and again, it could be that a team of more experienced programmers complete the basic program with perfection and then turns it over to a team of inexperienced grunts to blend it with the install program but either way, it's shabby business practice to turn the first impression of your flagship product over to a weakest link in your organization hence creating a nightmare for your support crew. I think any customer who has a problem with the install and then with or without help from support finally gets it installed but then puts absolute faith in the rest of the program is playing Russian roulette and setting themselves up for another nightmare down the road and/or volunteering to be an unpaid beta tester if they're going to ever deserve to have faith in the program. YMMV. I bought it to see what its capabilities were, and their other two products, Aurora HDR and the other one they bought out,"PhotoLemur" to learn from the PhotoLemur programmers how to program AI so they could incorporate it into Luminar which they now claim to have done.

I won't be buying or using Luminar AI because, among other reasons, if it automatically processes the initial images you feed it based on its own analysis, and then learns how to produce future images based on what was last done, I don't see how it will ever, a.) "learn" what YOU want it to do which is what we are supposed to believe it will do within an AI paradigm, and b.) ever manages to do anything other than what it did to the original images you gave it. You then would have exactly what you have with PhotoLemur. If you give PhotoLemur an image that is just slightly off with brightness, contrast, saturation, noise, and sharpness, it seems to be able to bring it up to snuff or get real close but if you give it an image that's several more degrees out and appears weak and overexposed or underexposed, PhotoLemur can't bring it in sufficiently in one pass although with multiple runs through it appears to get a little closer each run but rarely brings it in to become a really good image. I don't know what Luminar AI is going to do but if it is designed on the PhotoLemur model, I'm perfectly good with not knowing.

Thanks man. Ever since a bunch of my cousins from Arkansas moved to Kansas City I've been wondering what in the world it would look like when you're higher than a kite in Kansas City.

As I did a few days ago in another "Luminar AI" thread, I will repeat my advisory - if a software developer or firm cannot master the current state of the art install program without glitches, there's a good chance there's other algorithm "bombs" hidden in the software that won't show up until Murphy's Law kicks in, especially if true AI is implemented.

There's a couple of things I don't understand about Luminar. I got v3 then updated to v4 and have installed it on multiple computers and in no two cases has the install been the same and in more cases than not, the program cannot find its database in a machine. In no case, has the install completed so the program is fully functional and I've had to complete the install process manually. I haven't spent much time using the program and mostly just got it to be conversationally familiar with it but what impresses me is how in the world a company can "take us where no man has ever gone before into the next millennium" that cannot even master and adhere to the state of the art installation process. I know I am not alone - I've read too many complaints about this issue. I'm done with them. In case you're wondering, I often buy new software and look it over, and have done for years, just to be familiar with it and most of the time, never use it to process images. I don't like to be the only person in a conversation who doesn't know anything about what is being discussed and it makes it a little bit more difficult to "pull the wool over my eyes."

The one thing you have to watch out for with ebay is the seller stalling you off until the allotted complaint period to expires on you because then ebay won't even talk to you. It's real easy for the seller to stall you past the deadline due to the shipping times that occur between China and the U. S. and those shipping times are getting longer and longer in many cases. USPS says that every package has a tracking number. Well, it gets a Chinese tracking number that USPS doesn't recognize in some cases and multiple "aftermarket" tracking companies have sprung up and some of them are real tricky to understand so you may never really know where you stand. Add that to the USPS daily notice of mail that's arriving to you being very inspecific is an additional problem. The last package I didn't get was listed as "delivered" three days before it was supposed to have been delivered and it was never delivered, at least to me. There's an old saying, "if I bought it and it was addressed to me and never reaches to me then it is not delivered and if it doesn't reach the addressee then whatever else happens to it does not count! If a package is sent from China and insured by the seller then makes it into USPS channels and isn't delivered to the buyer then the buyer has to tell the seller it didn't arrive and either ask for a replacement or a refund. If a shipment took 6 or 7 weeks and didn't arrive and the process has to start over, it's real easy to blow by ebay's deadline on making a claim and you're dead in the water. If you ask for a refund and the seller clams up on you, he has your money, can make a claim on Chinese Postal system, get paid twice, you're past the deadline and PayPal looks at it where the independent tracking company says it was delivered and you're screwed. The seller tells you the replacement has been shipped and you give it ample time, 6, 7, 8 weeks and it doesn't come so the seller tells you he will find out what has happened and make it good and never does 'til he's past the deadline for a complaint. Ask me how I know... I gotta get a new keyboard - dropping letters left and right. Sorry!

Only every other day.