Been out in pouring rain several times... Rain harder than what comes out form the shower in the house. So that is no problem... I'd be more afraid of getting close enough to the bears to photograph them well.
I personally think 400mm is still a bit too close, but Pentax only has what, maybe 250mm or 300mm water resistant and certainly not in f2.8. Yeah, I might pass on that one.

Ohhh yes, I think I drooled a little when I saw the demo for those.

Nice thing is that although they support three/six monitors the OS thinks it is simply one large screen.
Solves a lot of OS and application related issues.

In addition to the software allowing calibration of more than one screen (sometimes only a matter of some financial upgrade ), the video hardware and OS also has to support multiple screen calibration. Most video hardware should these days.

Windows XP for example does not allow it without the addition of a hidden piece of software from Microsoft.
You can download the extra control panel item for free, but it is not included with any patch. (If interested I'll have to dig out my old PC and see if I can find what it was called).

Still, even with that, the second monitor would sometimes change color on its own. I mean I'm sitting there working, and instantly the color of the second monitor changes to a different profile. I finally gave up on Windows... headaches gone.

I don't know if Vista supported multi-monitor calibration very well but I believe Windows 7 does a much better job over all.

I generally agree with getting a good radio trigger.

Just do not base the quality on name brand or price alone, should you choose to get a radio remote.
Ask around and see what people recommend.

i.e. Elinchrom skyports have been nothing but trouble.
OK, a little harsh. They work *ok*, but only on par with the Chinese remotes that you can get for 1/10th of the price. Elinchrom support is a HUGE pain in the arse. I would *suggest* looking at any other brand than Elinchrom.

I personally use a radio trigger on only one light, and let that be the trigger for the others on optical slave.
This saves some money and works well in a controlled and enclosed area. Not necessarily so well outdoors or where other photographers might be firing flashes (even fluorescent lights are said to be problematic in some cases with the optical slave devices, although I have yet to have a problem myself)

It is better than whats in PhotoShop or Lightroom at the moment, but Adobe Camera RAW 6? (whatever will be included with CS5 and LightRoom3) blows it away completely.

Honestly, I downloaded this one and a few other noise reduction software titles. None really impressed me to a great extent. Maybe I just didn't use them long enough but if they are that hard to use, the upgrade price for LR3 or CS5 is enough to make up for the ease of use.

Does PSE include camera RAW at all? If so, wait out and see what the new capabilities will add.
Otherwise you might want to wait a bit and see what these guys have to offer to compete with what Adobe is about to set upon the world.

Been using the Eye-Fi X2 Pro for the past week for little bits at a time.
In the end, it seems like a useful alternative to tethering for the K7 and other cameras that do not have a tethering option.

No, you cannot control the camera in any way (no iPhone app for us, argh!) but for getting photos off your camera to the PC so that clients can see photos right away, this works well. It is nice that I do not need my assistant (er, um, wife) to swap out cards and download photos while I'm taking photos. And I don't have to re-train her on each outing on how to import photos from the card.

Transfer speed form the card through the network is about 1.5MB/s. So regardless of 802.11n or g network, the speed of the card is going to be the limiting factor. Comes out to about 5 seconds per photo with JPGs from the K7.

I save photos to the card in DNG+JPG and have only the JPGs upload to my laptop.

As for writing to the card itself, it is a class 6 card and real world write speed is about 6MB/s. So that is as expected.

Adobe Bridge/LightRoom of course pick up those photos automatically without problems. So this is an acceptable solution.



Sadly, the software design and stability for configuring the card is atrocious!!
If you can bear to read my sob stories, trying to get the darned thing to work, start about half way down page three of this posting. (I won't repost all my troubles here)

http://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/pentax-video-forum/85807-wireless-video-uploads-eye-fi-pro-x2-3.html

Once configured, and you get used to how they think things should work, it works quite well.
Outside of the configuration software, the card uploads to the server with very few problems.
Luckily I should not have to make use of the software except in very special cases.

If you can get your hand on the card, I would suggest it.
$150 is a bit expensive, but it will save a lot of time and effort through the year for shooting and eventually be worth it. (I do some jobs for pay, but not a lot.... your milage may vary. )

Sorry, thats what I meant. In CS4 that feature was crippled. It just leads me to believe there is no reason that Adobe would not feel the need to cripple the new features across product levels.

Dunno of others, but when I need something, do a search and find a solution, only to find that I cannot do it because the product is crippled, I get a bit bummed out.

I think it was with CS2 when I started wanting to do some sort of web work. I recalled some features being available in prior versions of Photoshop. They removed the whole set of web tools and moved them into another product. Bad timing on my part I guess, but I don't recall anyone advertising how the product was being neutered and features being removed at that time.

I guess I've just been a bit behind the eight ball on things I find useful. It really is not that big of a deal I guess, but it leaves me with distrust that Adobe will find some way screw with my life again. (Yeah, its all about "me" )

Love it: "Pain Shop". How fitting.
Nice product in Theory... way too slow and they totally screwed up color management in v10. Never seriously looked back.

Not much I'd need Extended for, but I see that they crippled the Stacking feature in the standard PS CS4 so that it is unable to remove or keep objects that may not exist in veery frame (remove moving people, or keep all people to make it look like more were there over the course of merging several photos)
No reason this feature needs to be crippled.

Also, some of the features that used to be in PS have been removed and lumped into other products or into Extended.

I am just hoping we don't see only a partial version of the new selection or context fill features included with the Non-Extended versions of PS. I also hope we don't see current features get moved out of standard PS or crippled because Adobe wants to further up-sell to a higher level product.

I don't need 3D ability, but I may need to pay for those features in order to get some tiny aspect that has been crippled out of the standard version.



What else would I use? Well, I might take another look at Paint Shop pro. Or Gimp.
PSP is so much more powerful in some aspects (simplifying standard functionality such as un-skewing a photo simply by drawing a box around what *should* be square, or having true paint-like brushes.)
Sadly, it lacks some features I've grown accustomed to in PS.

So I guess I'm stuck, eh?

Yeah, sadly, in a few of the demos where you can actually see any detail, the duplicated texture would be totally unacceptable by any but the most novice of users. For something like the desert road scene, I'd say it was a total disaster making the job more difficult to fix if anything at all.

Although I do a lot of cloning out of solid backdrops. I have higher hopes the content aware fill/cloning and the even smarter selections will add a big benefit for that...

Not real happy with the upgrade pricing. For those that did upgrade to CS4, you'll pay the same as those who sat back and waited for CS5. It makes me really want to save my money and decide if Adobe is really going in a forward motion in the grand scheme of things. i.e. what other functionality have they crippled or removed from CS5 and moved into Extended or into the full Suite in order to up-sell other products?

Nope, that about what you can expect from this lens. Not a duffer.
Simple enough to fix in software or if you have the K7, fix in camera.
Also, compared to some other lenses, that isn't so bad.

Honestly, I'd like to see less for a lens of that price, but then maybe the image quality would probably suffer. It seems with photography that every time you push one thing another has to get pulled.

To be fair, it is not a lens designed for architecture. But, hold it perpendicular to the subject and you probably wont notice the effect quite so much. (If the camera *is*perfectly perpendicular, then something is a bit off.) You can also try standing back a bit and zoom in.