Are there any mirrorless cameras that provide exposure metering information while ISO is being set? Every mirrorless I have (P&S or ILC) will not meter during ISO adjustment, so if I want to set ISO last after aperture and shutter speed (which is what I usually prefer to do), I have to adjust blind, as sort of a sad throwback to film days.

Fortunately, my dSLRs don't have that problem, but I'll bet it's more because dSLR viewfinders are intrinsically so primitive compared to EVFs more than any forward-thinking on the part of the manufacturers. Whatever the reason, I'll take it in the dSLRs, but wish I could find a mirrorless that did it.

I'm surprised this is even a question. It's free. Try it and if you don't like it, uninstall it. :-)

Personally, I love GIMP and can't figure out why some people say they have such a hard time with it. It's not identical to PhotoShop and doesn't do some things as well as PhotoShop, but then there are some other things it does better. The GIMP developers are currently working on a major architectural rework using a very powerful format converter (BABL) and a very powerful node-based graphics engine (GEGL) for version 2.10. It's a lot of work, so it's taking a while, but once finished, GIMP will be much more powerful and will have overcome what is currently it's biggest weakness -- that it works only in 8-bit space.

With the recent updates to RawTherapee though, I find it quick and easy to use for RAW conversion and most, if not all, global edits. It's now a very nice and sophisticated tool. Afterword if I want to do local edits, then I use GIMP. DarkTable is similar to RawTherapee and is a reasonable substitute, but I think right now RawTherapee is a little more advanced internally.

Probably the best way to go though is to use what your friends and associates use. If that's Lightroom and PhotoShop, then so be it. You'll be able to share knowledge between yourselves. If, however, you are mostly working by yourself, why not download GIMP and perhaps RawTherapee or DarkTable and give them a try?

Try a quarter moon rather than a full moon. Full moons have the light directly behind you so the moon "texture" is hard to see and pretty much always appears soft.

Rawtherapee is better than it looks. Especially the later versions. It does some very interesting and sophisticated things under the hood. Don't write it off.

I'm another happy customer of MT Shooter's NEST NT-530H gimbal head. I can't see how a person could do better. It's a very good quality gimbal head that you'd likely pay at least double for a comparable alternative. And I haven't been able to find a downside to it. To me it's a no-brainer.

I use it on FreeBSD, but it's the same on Windows, OS-X, Linux, etc. as long as you are talking about the same version (2.8 is current). It'll be different from Lightroom and PSE of course -- which is why I think a lot of people don't like it as they want it to be an exact Photoshop clone, but you can customize it to have similar behavior to the Adobe products. As long as you understand that it attacks and optimizes problems a little different than Adobe does, you shouldn't have any problems.

I ordered one from MT Shooter and it showed up today. Wow. What a deal!

I've never used a Wimberley WH-200, so there's always the possibility I have no idea what I'm talking about, *BUT*, this NEST NT-530H looks, feels, and operates pretty darn good. It is light weight but feels very solid -- as though it's made from metal, and the movement is butter smooth. I'd highly recommend considering it, but you'll have to talk to MT shooter as I'm not about to let mine go.

It's always good to ask, but frankly, I figure since you have absolutely nothing to loose, why wouldn't you try GIMP? I don't like saying GIMP is as good as Photoshop, because there's always people that will say GIMP doesn't have everything Photoshop has. That is true -- it doesn't. What you don't hear though is that Photoshop doesn't have everything GIMP has.

A lot of people say GIMP is hard to use, but I can't for the life of me understand why they'd say that. I know one person that had a difficult time with it, but then needed to start using it because of some of its strengths. Now he's completely baffled why he thought at one time it was hard. He probably just heard others repeat it so much, he just became convinced.

GIMP's single biggest weakness is that up to the current version -- 2.8 -- is still using 8-bits for most of its work. However, the GEGL graphics engine and BABL conversion engine is written and partially used in 2.8 and should be completely used in the next version -- 2.10. GEGL and BABL are very powerful, and can use pretty much any representation known. Like I say, why not just give it a try?

You may find that you don't need to use GIMP much though. As others have mentioned, 'darktable' has become a very nice program for picture management, RAW conversion and global editting/adjustments.

An alternative to 'darktable' is 'rawtherapee'. A year or two ago, rawtherapee was buggy, at least on my OS (FreeBSD), so I didn't use it. However, the current version is a completely different story. It's very powerful, using 32-bit floating point for all internal calculations and has a very nice set of advanced operations available. It's become my most used photo converter/editor as I can do almost everything I want in it. If I need local editing, I'll use rawtherapee to do as much global editing and adjustments as possible, then feed it to GIMP.

GIMP, darktable and rawtherapee are all free. Just download and use them.

[ Another GIMP/Photoshop/PaintshopPro-like editor that is free and worth looking at is 'krita'. Unfortunately, it may not yet be available for your OS as its primary platform is Linux. ]