That "rule" that the first time you use a term, you spell it out, is for the convenience of copy editors. For example, "This camera has a CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) sensor." My point is, if you don't know what "CMOS" is, spelling it out will be less than no help. To provide glosses (a "gloss" is what gets compiled in a glossary) on "complementary," "metal-oxide," and "semiconductor" would take the course material from several college courses. Here is a general principle that any writer, editor, or artificial-intelligence computer scientist will confirm: "No written document can be understood solely on its contents; there is ALWAYS context." When composing a written document, one of the hardest decisions to make is how much context to put it. Put in too little and you will loose the novices; put it too much and you will bore the experienced. The worst-case written documents are far too many technical manuals. A technical manual is defined as a document that you can't understand unless you already understand it. However, every specialized field has jargon, buzzwords, and what lawyers call "terms of art." Conflating these three categories is a mistake. Jargon would be the computerese "boot" for "start" and should be avoided. Buzzwords! They're awsome! Words of art: f-stop, focal length, color temperature, white balance, etc.

One last comment: To all those who said i should not post any photographs but ones i have taken personally, I refer you to the rules in the help section.
They say not to post COPYRIGHTED works of others. I could find no rule saying you could post only your own photos.

Yes, the reflections do not match the skyline. But the reflections may "reflect" only what was close to the shoreline while the skyline was everything between the photographer and the sky. I'm talking trigonometry here. If it was faked, how? That's is a simple request for information. I am just learning The GIMP and Photoshop. So if anyone has done compositing like this, i would appreciate a brief description of the steps entailed. As for it not being my photograph...well, I never said it was. And if you search with Bing (rather than Google) and check out Bing images (which images Bing's "web crawler" finds and then which Bing catalogs), you will find many copies of this shot. I am not an expert in copyright law, but it looked like it was in the public domain to me. And I thought we all might learn something from it. If its not in the public domain, then please accept my apology.

The head on an electric shaver?

Sarge, Three questions: 1. The mount for your telescope looks way more substantial than what I have seen on line -- namely, a telescope mounted on top of a spindly tripod. Does the extra weight of the camera cantelivered out there necessitate a more-sturdy mount? 2. If one has a Newtonian telescope with the eyepiece at the top of the tube, does your setup work as well? 3. For framing and composition purposes, can you see your subject in your camera's LCD? if not, how do you frame your subject? Do you compose the shot with your eyepiece and then mount the camera and take the shot?

As one who has traveled extensively in the third world, i advise you to get a bag that does not shout "There are expensive cameras in here! So please steal me!" Thinktankphotos bags are very practical, well designed, reasonably priced, sturdy and don't look like camera bags. http://www.thinktankphoto.com/products/retrospective-10-pinestone-shoulder-bag.aspx

Thinktankphotos Retrospective Pinestone

This shot is all over the web as "wallpaper." How many mornings must the heroic photographer have gotten up before sunrise, positioned himself or herself just right, hoped there would be no wind to ripple the lake, waited for the sun to perfectly bisect its own reflection in the lake, and then correctly exposed this shot! All i can say is WOW!

African Sunrise

Google is your friend:

n. prim·er 1 (prim er)

1. An elementary textbook for teaching children to read.
2. A book that covers the basic elements of a subject.

[Middle English, devotional manual, from Norman French, from Medieval Latin prmrium, from neuter of prmrius, first, from Latin, from prmus; see prime.]

n. prim·er 2 (prime er)

1. A cap or tube containing a small amount of explosive used to detonate the main explosive charge of a firearm or mine.
2. An undercoat of paint or size applied to prepare a surface, as for painting.
3. Genetics A segment of DNA or RNA that is complementary to a given DNA sequence and that is needed to initiate replication by DNA polymerase.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

But then, I remember when "presently" meant "soon."

While there are things you can do to get the subject in sharp focus and the background blurred "in the camera," it's very easy to get that effect with "post processing." You can spend a bunch of money on Photoshop, or get The GIMP for free (http://www.gimp.org/downloads/). The GiMP can be intimidating at first but if you check out my collection of short tutorials at http://ppl.ug/CPS0LvZOSD0/ you should be able to do the following after a viewing the introductory tutorials: 1. Cut out the subject and the sofa. 2. Paste them onto a new, transparent layer. 3. clean up the pasted-in image with the eraser tool. 4. Blur the background a couple of times with the Gaussian blur. 5. Take a stab at lightening the background so the the subject's head will "pop" out of the dark background. 6. Merge everything and save. The attached took about four minutes, start to finish in The GiMP.

Blurred background

In this context, "primer" is pronounced "prim-er." "Prime-er" is a kind of paint. As Elvis used to say, "Thankyouverymuch!"

Behance http://www.behance.net/ is a good site upon which to post a "portfolio" of your professional work. Check out the site and you will see that many creative people have taken a lot of trouble to post impressive portfolios there, so you will be in good company. One suggestion: Behance's user interface for posting a portfolio is just about the worst I have ever encountered. So if you have access to Photoshop or The GIMP or some capable photo editor, make a series of 8 1/2 x 11 inch (not so many pixels by so many pixels) JPGs onto which you paste, size, and arrange a selection of your work. 'Then add some explanatory text boxes. Lastly, upload your "pages," one at a time, to Behance using their simplest "template." That way your portfolio will look exactly as you want it to and you will save yourself the frustration of trying to wrestle Behance's UI into submission.

One fundamental fact about auto-focus: the camera does not and cannot measure the actual distance to the subject. No auto-focus camera sends out an infra-red or radar beam and measures the reflected signal. They all INFER focus by looking for maximum contrast between area of differing reflectivity.

Rick, I gathered a slew of short (4 minutes max) GIMP tutorials and arranged them in what I hope is a logical series that constitutes a "course." You can view them on-line, or download them, from:


Online GIMP course



http://ppl.ug/CPS0LvZOSD0/

If you check them out, by all means let me know what you think of them.

Chuck

I have seen lots of recommendations such as those below that say you should spend money to make your monitor "accurate." But there is one reply who says what he sees on his monitor looks pretty much like what comes out of his printer. i may be simpleminded but I really don't see the point of making my monitor show colors as "accurately" as possible. It seems to me that I want my monitor's display to look as much like my printer's output - especially if my printer is not "accurate."

Am I off the beam?

If you have Photoscape, you are home free for re-sizing and do not need any other program. I have found that re-sizing pics 500 pixels high is a nice compromise between making them small enough to send and having something recipients can view (they will not be able to pull big prints from reduced photos however). If you drag a pic into Photoscaper's Editor, either read the help documentation or just look at the menu choices under your pic and you will find "resize." Photoscape also has a Batch Editor. Here's how to resize a bunch of photos all at once: Run Photoscape and double click on the "Batch Editor" icon. In the right-hand pane, click on Add and select all the photos you want to resize. (Don't worry about ruining your originals. Photoscape automatically saves them.) When you have all your photos selected, look at the Home tab below the Add button. Futz with the Resize drop-down menu until it says "Adjust height" and "Height 500." Then click on the Convert All button. A big Save "wizard" will come up. You save them all with their original names. Or if you click on the "Save as a new name" radio button, you can chance the usual gibberish file names you get from a camera, such as img001.jpg, img002,jpg, img003.jpg, etc. to something evocative such as "Thankgiving <futz with the drop-down menu to get a name, date, and serial number combination you like> and maybe some more of your text in the box after the drop-down menu." Just check the line beginning with "Ex)" to see how your new file names will look (you might have to put some spaces or hyphens in your text). The click on "Save" and HEY! PRESTO! you should have significantly smaller photos that you can attach a "bunch" of any time in any combination you want. If you keep the total bytes of attached photos under 5 Mbtyes per e-mail, you should be OK. if you are going to attach or embed or insert just one pic, 910 pixels high seems to work pretty good.