my colleague sent a text: "I need a bigger suitcase!" after picking up the 100-300
I don't see that there's a light and effective way to get past 300. The Tokina 80-400 is OK with focus speed, as is the tammy 18-250 (and I'll compare again a siggy 100-300, Tamron 18-250 and 70-200 and original 50-200 if the opportunity presents itself) - the lens makes some difference and HSM is a nice thing to have. Still, you're looking at quite a bit of cash....

Bret

At the moment it has the 18-250 on; it was bought as body-only. Matching white kit lenses are £40 from SRS....

Bret

bump

yep, the K5 high ISO simply rocks....

Bret

you don't...it's no longer RAW when it's in PS. Why do you need it in LR again?

Bret

GIMP is seriously good. What do you want to do? About the only minimal quibble I have is not being able to use vectors properly - but then, neither can PS.

Each has their own supporters and - aside from the "we support PS plugins and a 48 bit colour space" I don't see any reason to spend money on this particular piece of software.

As far as GIMP is concerned, I can more than live with the interface, I have a G13 set up at work with very specific keys to make my life easier and it works beautifully with the wacom tablet. Add in the fact that UFRaw works and is relatively rapid with a decent external disk and it gets very, very close to Lightroom in terms of RAW usability. It doesn't do the catalogue thing - which I don't miss much, but I suspect I would if I'd used it for any length of time - and the plugins for Lightroom are really rather good if you're looking to deliberately edit your pics. Moral? GIMP with Batch Processor and UFRaw is all anyone should need and it's free. It doesn't tend to crash on me, either, unless I've loaded up more than 15 pics on a 4GB RAM machine which means I hit the disk and memory limits of the computer.

Bret

2 and 3 are great. No chance of a monopod? Or a fat gecko? (google it!)

Bret

iplayer tends not to work here..

Bret

I'll agree on monopods helping enormously. I didn't get one until I got the 80-400 - and then seriously appreciated it pretty much immediately. Nice when you can use them as a walking stick, too; mine has a 234RC2 head on it, so there's a plate on the tripod collar and another one on the body. Works nicely when switching lenses.

Bret

the "inside of the bend" thing I'd taken to heart from the ice track. I nearly got caught once and decided to move rapidly and have learned from the experience

If the weather's anything like decent, I figure that 1/400 is possible but I don't really want to go much faster than that unless I really can find a jump. That'll be the issue, I think. Fast SD cards will also have to be found before then.
I will probably try and be on a stage early on and then escape back out to a finish or start line later; the fun will be how the parking is dealt with as many stages start and finish in the complete wilderness...

My preferred positions are (I think, anyway):
inside of a seriously fast bend
slow one
a junction
the landing side of a jump
the service area at lunchtime

- Bret