And now for the bad news. An attempt to buy an update to the latest CS5 or latest version of Photoshop will result in sticker shock as Adobe will not honor an update beyond a couple of versions back. Since they are at the equivalent of Photoshop 11 or 12 you will have to buy new! Obviously, if you want to maintain the latest capabilities and available support, continual updating is required (with the resultant update fees). About the only way to get a significantly discounted price is to be a student at a qualifying school and buy through a scholastic price reseller or become a non-profit and go through a non-profit authorized reseller like CDW. They are going to get their pound of flesh one way or the other....

Last night, Jupiter and Venus hung around our porch and begged to be shot. About 10PM, Canon 60D, 24-105L, F22, 30 sec., ISO 6400, no post-process. Feel free to add other star/sky shots to this thread.

I do gratis photographic work for LifeTown, a life skills teaching facility for autistic children that resembles a small town, the annual "Taste of Pizza" charity event, and for our local contra dance club. Naturally, I am 'volunteered' by friends regularly. Carry around a scary camera and it is bound to happen....

Check out this 30 second video for hints on considering environmental conditions when positioning for a shot....

http://www.wimp.com/loseseconds/

It's an excellent lens. I have one. However, it would be a good suggestion bring your camera to the store, mount a sample, and take a few architectural shots of nearby building to satisfy yourself that the lens angle of view and handling are up to your particular requirements/expectations.

It is a very well built lens, feeling solid in the hand. It has a crafty focus ring that moves forward/back to quickly engage or lockout the manual focus option as opposed to a switch on the side of the lens. Both the focus and zoom rings move very smoothly. It uses the popular 77mm filter size for the top-of-the-line, multi-coated protection or UV filter it deserves. Overall, It certainly competes favorably with most lenses in its optical range and is a best buy considering its price point.

I, too had a Mavica as my first digital and certainly my worst digital, but I loved it, considering what else was available at its cost. Yes, it's resolution was VGA, but that was perfect for the Internet and eBay and still would be today. Unfortunately, I left it in front of my mother's stove and she PAMmed it.... Of course, I took it apart/reassembled it with the usual unnecessary parts remaining..., but its on/off switch never recovered and it remains paralysed.

HOLGA - I have a 25$ Holga adaptor for my Canon 60D and it produces wonderful romantic portraits when creative lighting is employed. It is total garbage compared to my new lenses, given its plastic lens (part of its character), but it is just as fun and requires the honing of a specific skill set as does any other lens system to perform as it was designed. Learning how to utilize a system to its potential is half the fun.

All these comments are pointing to changes caused by equipment improvements/ease of use and evolving social attitudes. It used to be that taking pictures was scary. You develop your roll and there is nothing but fuzzy blobs or worse. Naturally, nobody wanted to trust their sacred moment to amateurs or Uncle Ralph. Professionals were assumed to be skilled with their tools and, because of the processing complexity (darkroom post processing magic), the individual image costs and multiples were quite expensive, resulting in quality smaller albums after the final proof sheet selection.

Today, modern digital cameras auto-focus, auto-expose, vibrate compensate, auto-flash, and give instant assurance that something resembling a picture was actually taken and there is no film cost. This makes everybody an expert at point-n-shoot. It does not help their inability to understand composition, lighting, object hue if B/W is chosen, white balance, depth-of-field, movement considerations, etc. Thus, the quality varies from very reasonable to shots that might cause emotional distress for years.

The other problem is expectation. I just took (volunteered....) shots at a wedding and the main request was for activity photos. A 'professional' took the traditional shots of the bride tripping over her train and the groom with twenty-seven best buds, the throwing of the bouquet, etc. She was there for 45 minutes and left before the dinner and festivities. For my part, I was interested in preserving the excitment of the evening, the dancing in swirling lights, the proud parents, the buds in bud activies, anything impromptu. The parents wanted everybody included. I did my best to produce quality work, but their main requirement was preservation of the moment. The bride/groom just want to see their friends in the shots. Receiving something with some artistic content was an extra. I'm hoping that they see them as being more than just stuff in a rectangle and it trains them to have greater expectations in the future other than just snapshot point-n-shoot quality.

Regardless, it is becoming more and more difficult for professionals to justify their existance on a public that considers JPEGS on a computer screen to be good quality and MP3 audio to be satisfactory fidelity. As a once fanatic, golden ear, audiophile, it pains me to listen to MP3 recording on cheap computer speakers. But, that is the standard today and, unfortunately, the expectations of the mainstream public.

Even more important, you will have no direct warranty service in the US as the US distributor made no money from the sale. He allots a certain amount of the sale of US bound lenses towards occassional warranty events. Your Hong Kong lenses does not qualify. You will have to return it to Hong Kong for warranty service. The shipping will be more than whatever you saved in the purchase. Many of the Hong Kong eBay sellers are not camera stores, rather sell for other distributors. It's a mess for warranty recovery.

[quote=davejann]There is no way to disable the preflash, apart from not using the onboard flash. The preflash takes care of the metering and sends the signal to the on board to fire. You can see the bottom of page 141 of the manual.]

The quote on page 141 is pertenant only to firing external Speedlites wirelessly (when the internal flash is disabled) and does not stipulate anything about the pre-flash. The preflash uses the onboard in low power stutter mode to aid focus when the button is half-pressed. It does not set off the synced flash for the actual photo. You can pre-flash a number of times before initiating a picture.

I have had no trouble with a 60D internal flash controlling external, wireless flash units that are designed to detect pre-flash events. External flashes such as the LumoPro LP160 Quad Sync are capable of being set to optionally accept the pre-flash event without tripping by selecting S1 on the slave selection switch. When selected the preflash does not set off the external flash units.

Of course, utilizing some wireless remote sync units to trigger the external flashes would increase the versatility of your equipment.

This is a one-up on this child. Please feel free to post our own baby pics.

Small child at a contra dance.

Chloe at contra dance