hi sophie, might be useful to know what the light was like when you took your whale pics - sunny / cloudy etc, and what is the colour temperature value recorded in the images for the whale pics ?

Hi Mike, any idea what noise reduction settings were used for the K-X pics ?

Hi aminstar, can't believe your're willing to part with the 60-250 it's brilliant imho - the edge to edge sharpness and IQ makes it nearly perfect for my landscape usage. The 300mm though adds something extra special to the image vs the 60-250 judging from my brief plays with the 300 in SRS.

I commend your level headedness though, if you're not using them and they don't suit you style and you're confident it won't change much then why keep them ?

Anyway, do you still have the tamron TC and how much are you looking for for it please - I didn't see a price ?

Hi Martin,
I looked into this a while ago after wondering how on earth I was going to keep track of my ever growing no. of pics, and after hunting around decided on photools iMatch. Small company but active user forum and the developer isn't afraid to answer queries himself.

I find the iMatch dynamic category approach very useful and I can find things pretty quickly, IMHO it does help reduce the organisation effort and you can easily restructure your approach if you wish. You can do your file management from within iMatch, and because of the categories approach you're not straightjacketed by the physical organisation of image files within windows folders. Batch file renaming is pretty straightforward.

one advantage is that you can keep small cached versions of you pics in it and then continue working on the database even if the pics are on DVD or another machine, which I like. You can also easily copy the database from PC to laptop and add pics whilst on holiday or on location for example.

I've got about 6000 images loaded up and it's not slowing down.

drag and drop from iMatch into silkypix for editing is a doddle.

I haven't decided on my best approach to keywording yet but that's a personal thing, not something to do with the tool.

The database querying is pretty powerful, just specify the filter you want, or just drag categories into a query builder, you can generate webpages with it too which I like. There's even a 'find images like' feature (including finding pics from a hand-drawn sketch - which more for fun than serious use I think !!)

There is no built in versioning support, however some users have set up some scripts to do this, based on using sensibly structured image filenames. The user forum can assist you I'm sure.

My feeling is that to get the best out of it some IT or software or database familiarity is an advantage, but it's not essential.

Like most DAM tools I've looked at you do need to put some thought into how you want to use it, probably best to set up a small test database, experiment and play with that before loading all your images in !!

worth a look IMO :- http://www.photools.com/imoverview.php

where's "here" please ?

got a sky3 and a sky4 in the end, with fully charged batteries the AF200T triggered off a sky3 even seems to work with PTTL (for a while anyway) - obviously manual is the way to go tho !

what the 0800 083 3113 number ?

I tried that and all they could come up with was "it's out of stock" ??!!! then gave me an 0845# for my local branch who were unable to locate one

thanks for the tip on stands, that's been bugging me - cheapest tripod I could find was significantly more than that !

hmmm, I have thought about this type of thing, but to be honest I doubt I would use it again ! My preference is to spend about 1/10th of this amount and get my head round basic lighting principles and balance of ambient light to flash. The other point is that the largest space I have available as a 'studio' is in our living room, so it's not easily available - it can be done but it's a hassle

thanks for the links for the sites peter.

yes I do have a few flashguns - AF540FGZ (PTTL), AF240FT(TTL), AF200T, AF240Z both thyristor - oh and a sigma 430 or somthing kicking about somewhere, I must sell a few !