Keep checking eBay for a used volume. LR5 books are cheap as they are yesterdays newspaper as it were.

I enjoyed the film, the photography was great. The only thing that bugged me was when the train started out it had but three passenger cars, stuck on the mountain side it had a whole lot more, maybe 9 or more. At the end it was back to three green cars. Magical train?

I have stopped using my ring flash as it gives a very flat light. The off camera flash with a diffuser gives better detail.

I subscribe for it and also had subscribed for Pop photography which went under. Lots of ads but like anything else it is a source for stimulation of the photographers eye. Not a lot of instruction but stimulation is priceless or at least worth its subscription price.

This topic has had much response. I agree with used glass. I have a nikon and I have picked up excellent film era manual and autofocus lens at modest prices. As to the desire to shoot ala Ntl. Geo. I also had such a wish but considered their exotic venues out of reach. I studied their work and decided that their work is technically correct but the fact that the subject is exotic to me, is why the images are so interesting. They are interesting to us but could look like snapshots to those who live where they are taken.

I am never going to go to the far corners of the earth and I am not even going to get up in the middle of the night to drive to a spot to capture the first rays of daylight. There is beauty and drama in life and nature where i live. I am on a mission to develop my eye to see it in color, harmony, life, emotion, the macro world and the occasional tension in nature. I think this may be harder than catching a flight to exoticville.

Good luck in your photographic life but develop your photographers eye and perhaps Natl. Geo. will put you on retainer. JB

Here is the link to DXO I had put this up earlier as a general info but it was taken down by admin. you enter your email and they send you the software Key an the download link. Best of luck


http://www.dxo.com/us/practicalphotography

DXO is giving their Raw editor away for free, full package not a trial just not up-
gradable. looks very good.

Ha! I have a similar photo the guy has this look on his face and you can read his mind! What the ........

Keep practicing and use a tele so you can stay way clear....

Since you are mainly concerned with a shoot your system does not need storage for your entire catalog. Swap out your harddrive for a SSD drive and max out your memory. Your i7 performance will increase significantly since the software will process totally in memory.
when you get home dump all your work to a larger storage system for your total catalog.

Gene51 I forgot about the heat issue. He is looking for a laptop and that has limits. I still think the gaming graphics card will not help him but I do not know how lr and PP code caches out or offloads frames as it crunches. Do you know?

It just occurred to me that you might look into overclocking your i7 cpu. you do realize that you have a tremendous cpu you may not be getting everything you can out of it.

I have been out of the PC sales world for some time but I am pretty sure a gaming machine will not do you any good as I do not think the power of the graphic card with it's own cpu and memory will be accessed by Photoshop. Your primary CPU will do all of the crunching. If your i7 is bogged down now you may just need to see how the cpu cash is set up and also strip back any and all background demands on the CPU. I did not remember if you had a SSD drive. but that would help in all of the rendering and if you need to move all your photo catalog to a external USB 3 drive. That will slow down your scanning through your catalog but your laptop will be a racecar in processing.
Apple is great but you would be using the same software and possibly the same CPU and like I said I do not think Adobe code is written to offload to any graphics card.

I have the Seagate 4 GB drive and I have moved my entire Lightroom catalog onto it. I also have a desktop with a large drive and copy it to that drive. I am happy with it and it has taken a few bumps and has had no problem. That being said drives are drives and there is always that risk. Seagate is a stable brand for what it is worth. I do not use the backup software that came with it. I do not want compressed data I want a copy of the actual file if I want to see it or pull it down. best of luck.

Yes, very nice. Great detail.

The blacks in the pic of the dog are blown out. I am not sure if that was done in processing but all detail in the mouth is gone. I would try and salvage any detail if possible.