I was attacked by this butterfly today while walking to get my mail. (Never seen anything like it) I went back to the house, grabbed my camera and got these. Hope you enjoy them.

Just a tad out of focus (windy)

I use ProShow Producer. It's a top of the line slideshow creator. There are different versions for everyone's price range. You can find it here, http://www.photodex.com/ I highly recommend Proshow Producer, but Proshow Gold is also very good. You can also try each of them for free.

Spot metering in manual mode might be a little tricky if not using a tripod. I usually use it in AV or TV, when I do use it. I use it for strong front or back-light subjects. Below are a couple of examples of spot-metering. In the top exposure I metered off the center of the flowers. As you can see the top of the stem is correctly exposed but behind the flower is underexposed. Say, just say, I didn't care about the flower and I only wanted the shadow area of the rock behind it correctly exposed. If you were in Partial or Evaluative metering it probably wouldn't expose it correctly. You need to tell the camera EXACTLY what you want correctly exposed. So, I lifted the angle of the camera and metered off the rock and got a correct exposure for it. Same thing for the flower. But, you'll also notice I didn't meter off anything too dark or too light. Your camera sees in shades of gray. If you meter off something too dark you'll overexpose the shot. Same thing with white or something bright, it'll be underexposed. Picture the scene in black n white and get your reading off something medium gray. That's what they're talking about 18% gray. The good thing about digital is you can practice all you want and it costs nothing. In the days of film you could waste a lot of money mastering your camera. Anyway, I hope this helps.

PS, You might want to use the exposure lock button while using spot metering if you recompose the shot.

Took reading off top of stem where it starts spreading off


took reading off shadow area of the rock

Sure, I believe that day I had my 7D with the 70-300mm F4-5.6 IS USM

I'm taking my daughter and a bunch of her friends, so I'll be busy with them and probably holding god knows what for them half the time. At last count there are six girls and me, so I'm not anticipating optimal picture taking conditions. So, what I'm taking will be minimal. I may take my 50mm 1.4 just because it's my favorite. When it's just me I take all my primes, if I need to change lenses, no problem. But with six 10 year old girls I don't see it being very convenient.

Does Gimp handle Raw files?

Thank you for the info and the link. Helps me a lot.

I've used both. My old 20D came with the 18-55mm NON-IS. It is the kit lens that came with that camera. I would not recommend that one. The new one, the 18-55mm II IS is much better. I've used my buddy's and it's a decent little lens for the money. I think dpreview has a review on it, you might want to check it out. It's pretty sharp and has decent color.

I sometimes use it for shots real close to the ground and I don't want to get dirty or there are times when the subject was at some weird angle and didn't allow me to look through the view finder. I found that it focuses very slow and you must keep camera very still or it'll move out of focus. 99% of the time though I use the view finder.

I'm going to the Getty Museum in a week or two and I was wondering if anybody has gone there and could give me a heads up on the lighting conditions. Is it relatively bright or is it dark and I'll need a fast lens. I'm hopefully only taking two lenses, a wide zoom and a medium zoom, both with IS. My only fast lenses are primes and won't be taking them unless absolutely necessary.

Picasa has been owned by Google since 2004. Look it up.

It wasn't a very good year at the Poppy Reserve this year, but there were a few areas worth stopping at and getting out to take some shots.

Here's some exposures I took last spring up in the high desert of California.

You can download Picasa at picasa.google.com and Picmonkey at www.picmonkey.com I'm not sure if it's a program of Google's.

Try Faststone at faststone.org or Picasa at google's site. Just search for Picasa. I use both and are pretty good for free.