Thanks to all for replys and help. I will try everything suggested as I am very interested in takning quality photos...even if they are just for me. I want pics like I see in Montana Outdoors or Photographic magazine. Don't know if i'll ever get there, but I see where I want to go.
I am currently shooting a Nikon D3100 with a af-s 200 lens. I use paint shop pro 4x and aftershot for processing. My heart is in lanscape and wildlife photos so I find myself really pushing that little 200 mm lens to get me photos its not really meant to get. So i end up trying to blow them up for detail in paint shop and wind up with photo degredation. I can have a crystal clear shot of an eagle feeding as a 5x7 but when i try to make it grow i get noise. oh, by the way I view my pics on my tv, a visio 32 inch hi def. that may be part of the problem too. A 5x7 or 8x10 may always look noisy when it fills a 32 inch screen? I don't know. On the other hand I get some really great shots if conditions are right and i can get closer. Sorry about the blah blah....what I'd like is some advice on a great quality lens in the 500 to 600 mm range with auto focus that will work with my nikon (only because i've read that the manual focus on those is very tough to deal with) and some opinions as to whether i'm causing myself trouble by using my tv as a monitor. thanks to all. There is such a curve to this stuff i can use all the help i can get.
Also, find some items with image impressions of some deity in them...for example find the image of the pope in a bar of soap or some piece of paneling. The holy grail would be the image of Jesus in a two pound block of montery jack. That - you could sell on e bay!
Man what you need are SPONSORS!! you wouln't even have to take good pics and you'd still get thier cash, like those bigfoot hunters I see on t.v.
ahhhhh I see. That explains why it was random, cuz I made some changes in the NX 2 program but mostly use Paint shop pro 4x and after shot. Thank you's all around.
Ive been saving pics in y computer for some time now and suddenly i've discovered several with an additional extention attatched after the jpeg or tiff. it is .xmp. I have traced this to a graphics driver program amd and also it is widely used by Adobe. The internet calls it Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform, used by photoshop and acrobat. I have acrobat but used the new corel software for all photo manipulations. How did these extentions get in my pictures files? I have no program that will open them. If I just remove the .xmp and leave the jpeg the computer tells me now there is two of those files and i still cannot open either. I have tried all the usual windows pic viewers, as well as the corel, also the Nikon NX 2. Nothing. Incidentally the Icon in the pic file also is different. Any thoughts why and what to do?