I think my elinchrom radio slaves are amazing!
they wind up costing about halve the price of pocket wizzards, and are very good!

bugs me that, in this day and age, one should ever have to bother thinking about it.
it should set itself, when you plug it into your usb port.

if you can afford the 540, you should consider the option of getting two 360's instead.
More power, more flexible, more options.

I think the judges can, if they so choose, opt not to critique every single entry.....that would cut the work down to three critiques, and the entries could be open to critique by everybody.

another possibility, is to let everybody vote thru some kind of poll....

but I'd say if it's not broke....

I like!javascript:emoticon('')

Great....now we'll have to add steel belted, speed rated, papers to the list of things to confuse us when buying supplies.....

when you want to do drastic changes....you have more detial in the file to play with.
with raw you get to decide what data to keep and what to trash.
with jpeg you only got what the camera didn't already throw out to work with.
here's an image I was playing with (nothing too fancy, just foolin' around):
before:


after:


sometimes a snapshot, that might get tossed, comes in handy for another project.
had I shot that in jpeg, this shot wouldn't likely work so well as it'd be blocky, full of artifacts and color banding, when I was done altering it.
now I got to straighten up the pillars, add a sweeping motion blur and some fog, then cut out the area behind the doors and drop in a blue moonlight cemetary shot...but no hurry...I got till October to finish this one!

oops wrong lens...sorry mines the 28-70 f4

that lens has been discussed in detial..do a search...
I own one...love it.
It can hold it's own with much more expensive glass.
constant ap f4, close focus, minimal distortion.

some users complained of problems with the rear element (perhaps a faulty batch out there, but something to look for).

look at it this way:
for the price of a single pentax battery for the k10-k20 you could but three sets of 2500 energizers (mentioned) plus two chargers (one ac one dc for the car). and and never run out of power.
I have both k10 and ds2 (same battery options as your k100)