Thanks, Searcher..
I have been hoping to hear from kubota_king.

Have been to Roscoe.

Curious what led to your approach?

And stuff a 13" piece in your car between the driver's seat and console, to prevent losing your lens caps and phone camera in the crack; lol.

I, too, just ordered it; thanks.

Lighthearted you are and you survived.
I laughed after a crash once too.
Dog was between my legs, under the desk.
Computer crashed.
Later figured out I had patted the dog on the head, tail got wagged, and a swipe of the tail had unplugged the power cord.

The knowledge of the above respondents is dizzying!
And informative; I had not thought about what drives hood design for a 20mm lens.

As for Nikon support, I'd have thought their process-oriented business culture would have driven support to get an answer. On the other hand, last year I reported a specification error on their web site; Nikon confirmed the error, thanked me, and fixed their web site world-wide, from Japan.

These remarks offer a way to think about theft and pricing of software like LR and PS. Relevant here is that photography products and services may show some of the theft and pricing dynamics of software. What I'd have liked to include here is the element of counterfeiting, but this post is long enough.

Before Microsoft teamed with IBM to become a dominant force in software, I lived on the Monterey peninsula and consulted to Digital Research, which was the dominant software force in the PC world (before Digital Research gave way to Microsoft at the end of the 1970s). At that time, the first PC software buyers were troubled by the cost of software. Sellers of PC software like Digital Research -- and especially the founder of DR -- were troubled by software theft.

At that early point, most people realized that PC software's cost promoted theft. Someone at the time opined that the theft problem would not go away until software was priced similarly to books, which we cannot be bothered to steal. We are completing this long march to book-like pricing, IMO. I think Adobe CC has reached that point. In retrospect, this person's insight seems to rank right up there with Moore's Law.

If you think about it, competition from more software developers and vendors has diminished theft because competition has obliged software publishers to continuously trim pricing, across the decades. The lowering of software prices toward the level of book pricing has been increasing the fraction of people who cannot be bothered to steal software.

We still see a major theft problem with people whose incomes are markedly lower, but in a decades-long process, this is balancing itself worldwide as economies develop and as migrants gain earning power through acculturation. The matter of outright counterfeiters and their attitudes remains, naturally, but the topic and its solutions are distinct.

While Adobe's subscriptions corral most thievery into obsolete versions, I am not sure theft was the sole driver for Adobe senior management to take the major risk of moving to subscriptions. The Adobe subscription model is delivering more predictable revenue and profit to Adobe (But, see the current issue of "Barrons" for Adobe's subscriptions outlook.). Subscriptions are enabling customers to avoid a front-loaded expense without continuous attention to maintenance (Cf. Adobe's Flash.).

For business customers of Adobe, the subscription outlay is ratable (charged as incremental consumption when used), which better matches expenses with income across time.

Subscriptions can deliver more revenue per customer over time for CC-type products. Subscriptions deliver something akin to book pricing yet can extract more than that over time, ingeniously slow-cooking the frog=customer.

Subscriptions cut delivery costs, align with a market trend to subscriptions, benefit Adobe and customers with selected cloud technologies, strengthen the moat around Adobe's business that competitors must cross, reduce the appeal of theft, and minimize the support horror show of people being on so many versions.

When it comes to property theft, intellectual-property theft, academic cheating, and the like, subscriptions indirectly recognize the presence in society of an irreducible element. For this harmful social element, the thrilling avoidance of capture seems to dwarf ethical concerns. Subscriptions cope with the fact of this element by making the software vendor a less-attractive target.

[quote=elliott937]I'm going to throw in a curve to this discussion, because I believe it is important. This is partly from my colleague at my university who teaches Photoshop along with his staff. Because of the size and world wide extended campuses of our university, he deals with a rather "high up" rep from Adobe. He told me, told to him from the Adobe person, that a major significant reason why Adobe switched to the rental plan instead of continuing to sell Photoshop was because fewer and fewer people where actually purchasing Adobe Photoshop. Why? Because so many have stolen it and continue to pass along stolen copies.

In my opinion, that is somewhere between sad and pathetic. Stolen copies of any software is theft.

I mentioned "partially". The other part of this sad story is from what I have heard, over and over again, and for more than the past ten years. When I've looked at new computers at the Apple store, or Micro Center, or Best Buy, I often dialogue with other customers, to perhaps learn their experiences. When I mention I use it for my photography needs, I'm sickened when I hear so many say "Oh, I have Photoshop on my computer, but I didn't buy it". Even at Radio Shack, I'd hear people say the same thing, said with pride. When I would ask if they use it, the majority say "oh, no, I just have it, since it was free".

Then to "add insult to injury", I always hear students of mine, basically very good people, tell me they had Photoshop in their computers, even though they paid nothing for it.

This is all so sad. Theft is theft. You can not rationalize it away.

I needed to say this. I thank you for taking the time to read it. Perhaps you'll pass it along to your friends, children and grandchildren.[/quote

I do have a Mac Book dedicated to photography. but have a second display for photography, which appears quite different from the laptop. The laptop display is unreliable due to tilt changing its appearance. A larger external monitor seems critical for evaluating images. LR has nice capabilities for a second screen, ably described in the Kelby book that others recommended.

I am very new to PP, so I remember what I'd do differently if that were possible. ;>)

You have a wealth of information in the earlier replies, so you can get off to a good start. The crucial initial step is to avoid going down a path that is unresponsive to your needs.

If you decide on LR, then adopt the current version, to avoid time-wasting version issues. The third way to lose momentum, if you choose LR, is to start your PP adventure by fixing your pictures. The antidote to this temptation is to treat LR navigation as the foundation for all of PP in LR and PS.

With LR, be prepared for some significant overhead (time) as you need new skills to navigate. When you shall have popped out at the other end, you will see that developing LR navigation skills is foundational and you are likely to feel that a couple of days, focused on navigation alone, is justified up front.

For maximum speed in mastering LR navigation -- navigation is not intuitive -- I offer this recipe, in retrospect:

(1) To get an initial grasp of the overall navigation framework, work through the incredibly short discussions and recipes in the first two chapters of "Teach yourself Lightroom." This is in magazine format, sold in bookstores. Skip selected topics, like maybe location tagging, as being non-essential to your budding navigation skills. When you have the foundation to move beyond navigation, pay an early visit to pp. 60-61, a short exercise in removing color casts.

(2) Consider the just-issued 2015! Kelby book recommended to you here by other hogs -- it has longer, practical navigation recipes and crucial tips in the first two chapters. While these workflow chapters are quite long, you can, as a beginner focused on learning navigation, skip over a goodly number of the topics, for example, face tagging and smart collections.

For beginners, like me, "N Photo" has been useful, as I learn there about what I did not know I need to know, including non-Nikon equipment; LOL.

For example concise articles, like their January 2015 two-page sharpening discussion include use of masks to protect clear areas from sharpening. I do not recall this coming up in yesterday's very valuable discussion on UHH of sharpening -- not that it should have, but "N Photo" is complementary in this case, with crisp how-to.

When I got my entry-level DSLR, I was fortunate to have grabbed a copy of N Photo's special issue, probably still on sale in bookstores, "The Ultimate Nikon SLR Handbook".

I enjoy buying this content at B&N with a membership discount and 20% coupons. ;>)

In the opening of this article, reviewer Huff says this small new camera is great for capturing life's decisive moments. And Huff explains why.

Huff's remark probably is building on photographer Cartier-Bresson's definition from 1952: "Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” So I knew right away that Huff brings perspective and that he is worth reading. He was and is.

Thanks for the link, Richard. This camera builds in the features that I have to cobble together for Nikon. James Bond would like this camera.

Agreed; super!

Would like to hear about Nimitz; I'm off to Fredericksburg in a month (pilgrimage to Nimitz's home town).

1 because "?" is a jump to the keyboard's end and 1 is a jump back to the keyboard's start.