The anti red eye function works by sending out two pulses with a delay between them. The first pulse is designed to make your subject's iris's contract, limiting the amount of light that is reflected from the backs of their eyeballs (this is the cause of red eye) when the main flash goes off. There has to be a delay in order for your subject to react between flashes.

All anti red eye systems work in exactly the same way, personally I never use them as (as you've noticed) they slow down the picture taking process and you often lose the moment.

I'll start with the bad stuff; I think your depth of field is too narrow, it would be nice to have the whole links in focus but as it stands the parts nearer the camera are out of it - try using a smaller aperture. Also, I find the area in the lower left of the picture where the sand has uncovered the surface below to be a distraction - watch for these sorts of things and, if neccessary, take a few seconds to set your shot up. In this instance a quick brush would have spread the sand out again and made for a more pleasing backdrop.

Now for the good bits; the subject itself has an interesting texture and good colours. The positioning of the links in the frame is also pleasing to my eye. I think you have the makings of a good photo but it requires a little more attention to the small details before it's a great one.

All good practice though - I've been taking shots for more years than I care to remember and I haven't come up with a "perfect" one yet!

Very nice shot Ben, but then I'd expect nothing less from you...

Some nice shots there, I especially like the second and fourth ones!

I guess the trick with this sort of photography is patience, waiting for the moment when your subject acts in a photogenic manner. If it were me I'd set the exposure values and focus manually in advance and keep watching - that way when the decisive moment happens the camera can react as quickly as you can press the shutter. At long focal lengths you'll be contending with shake so keep your shutter speed high and I'd go for a medium aperture to allow a decent depth of field (around f8-f11), if the light's less than perfect then you may want to crank up the ISO to allow both these things to happen. Take a few test shots first and check your results on the LCD - tweak camera settings to taste.

Good luck!

Which what will fill your needs best? What sort of pictures are you hoping to achieve? The multi exposure mode isn't really all that great for action shots unless you can control the action - lions and gorillas aren't exactly known for working to scripts...

Not tried that one yet - I'll have a go this week.

When you take a series of shots (with the averaging feature switched on) then only those things that appear stationary in *every* shot end up making the final picture - transient parts of the scene (people walking past etc) are averaged out and either appear as faint ghosts or not at all, depending on the length of the individual exposures and the number of them used to make the final composite. You'll need to experiment a bit to get what you're after and by bracketing the shots you can get a pseudo-HDR effect (like above - taken at +1/0/-1EV). I've played with it a bit and come up with some interesting effects - not neccessarily what I've set out to achieve but interesting nonetheless!

Not the greatest of photos, but this was 3 exposures using the multi-exposure mode (auto EV adjust on):




Particularly useful when you want to remove people from a scene, take long exposures without ND filters or shooting at high ISO's with negligible noise. I'm sure there are many other uses but I don't have the imagination...

I think the first one would have been better without the frame to be honest, it's a bit busy and detracts from the main picture which is actually quite nice.

I love the second one though! The colours are fantastic and the focus is absolutely perfect - one of the best "bee on flower" portraits I think I've seen on here, excellent!

In which case I'm afraid I can't help - I've never tried anything on USB that's longer than 5m. I'm sure someone will be along soon who has though...