You are dead-on with your explanation. I likewise am a professional photographer, now retired. When the subject faces left, your eyes, upon viewing the face, are immediately leaving the subject's face and wandering outside the right hand border of the image. Whereas, with the subject facing the right, when you see the image, you first look at the nose and eyes, then leading your eyes into the face. You can test this idea by glancing and not staring at images facing both directions. Each time you will linger longer on the subjects facing right, as your eyes are naturally pulled into the face. The original photographer was correct---a portrait facing left creates tension and prevents you from enjoying the full benefits of the face and eyes because you see the face before you see the eyes--at first glance. Remember here that the operative word is "first glance"....

A DVD? What is that? snicker, snicker, Nobody burns DVDs any more. In iMovie, there is a Share button at the top of the menu bar. Click that and you export the movie as a YouTube video or email to your family/friends/clients. Plastic dvds have gone the way of the VHS tapes---that's why Apple no longer supports iDVD. It's too time consuming to burn a DVD. You can also save to a file if you insist and it's an mp4 QT movie. Folks these days want to view on their iPads, iMacs, etc so there is no point in making them load a dvd any longer.

I use iPhoto all the time for slide shows. You CAN add as much music as you want, vary the transitions, and then export to IMovie to burn the DVD. Use the Help menus or take lessons from your Apple store. If I can do this, so can you.

For these shots, I would use my flash and set the WB to flash. You will have too tough of a time doing what you want to do in a short time frame. The best way to WB is using the Kelvin setting. I do this all the time, especially indoors under tungsten lighting. But for now, use flash.

MiroFoto, please go to your bookstore and buy a copy of LR for Dummies or The Idiot's Guide to LR. Once you learn the basics of adjusting the exposure, highlights, and the shadow sliders your world will rock!

Do the Lawrence Livermore late afternoon and watch the fog roll in across SF Bay. Very impressive event

If you are a Nikon user, you can get a great manual from www.ByThom.com.

I have a D7100 and you will definitely get focus problems with low contrasty images, like you see in low light on a gray street. I have a lot of problems when photographing babies and young toddlers because their skin sometimes will not provide enough contrast for the focus to lock. I suspect that's your problem here. You are trying to focus on the street and in low light, there's not enough of a contrast in the asphalt for the focus to lock. Try focusing on the street and a darker area near it and you should be able to lock focus. Remember it's the "asphalt" for the focus not to lock, lol. You can test this theory out by trying to focus on a white or beige wall. You will see that the focus rarely locks on the wall.

Also add in here that the reason you use HSS is when you are generally trying to overpower the sun outdoors and as you know this is impossible. So to get those bright bursts, the flash duration has to be short to keep from melting everything down You are attempting to make the flash into a small laser, ha

Try adjusting your while balance to ºK and see how much fun that is. You can get pretty close to neutral when shooting fluorescents if you use the Kelvin scale.

Ask Tim Grey. He is a pretty good expert on LR. email is tim@timgrey.com

The way to get to Heaven is through believing in God And The Lord Jesus Christ. There are 2 Bible verses to help you understand that: John 3:16 and Romans 10:9

I have the D7100 and D800. I've been using Lightroom for PP. It handles raw files by default with ease. I only use PS for things that LR can't do

If you have a Mac, then buy a 4T LaCie external hard drive. you can get about 4M images stored on it before you need another one.

I bought a D7100 for a walking around camera and personally needed the lightweight now. I getting too old to carry Nikon's tanks around. Also bought the 18-140 lens with it and occasionally will use an older Tokina 11-18 wide angle. The D300 images above look soft to me. I prefer my D7100, but that's just mho. Thanks for the strings