I sold a K20D body on eBay for £507 a week or so ago - where else would you get that sort of return?

Networking. be as many places and make as many connections as you can.

Certain subject matter also attracts viewers, but that depends on what sort of photography you produce. Nude/Glamour shots will double the number of views.

On my own website gallery, the Figure Studies section has in some cases a hit rate of three times my average.

No weather sealing on the *istDL, so normal precuations apply!

xp and 1GB of RAM are not the problem. The PC I use for this purpose also only has 1GB and it's fine.

Is there sufficient scratch disk space on your hard drive? If the hard drive is almost full that could explain the problem - both Windows and the Blurb soft ware will need space to run.

Have you deleted all unecessary programs and files? Disk cleanup? Disk defragmenter? All these things may help.

That sounds very interesting. I've seen very old lenses with incredible diaphragm construction of many blades (didn't count them) and that gives a much more circular opening. Shaping the blades as well sounds a great idea.

It seems lately there has been much more attention paid to the effect the diaphragm shape has on the character of the image.

Actually we haven't seen it yet, so it's a bit early to be so dismissive.

More specific information is needed to make any suggestions. Especially the lens and the settings used.

I'm not sure about the rainbow as I wanted it to hit and illuminate the tree, but of course that's unrealistic as Don points out.

I tried an all colour version but didn't like it, so i may leave it at that.

I didn't have colour popping in mind when I did this - it's not strictly that anyway - but rather more to introduce a ray of light (hope) into a monochrome world.

We could maybe do with some of that generally in this world of ours!

It's a composite of two images. The background is the landscape and this was converted to IR mono in Channel Mixer. It's important to do it this way otherwise you can't drag the colour image (rainbow and black sky) into the image.

The image is now two layers which can be adjusted in Levels separately.

Then we explore Blending modes to see which gives the desired effect, coupled with some erasing of unwanted details in the top colour image.

Flatten image, save as required. I think I'll have a try with it all colour.

Isn't that a bit harsh hefty1?

After all, that could apply to anything. You don't expect a camera to smell of damp, so that's a significant defect not described.

By the same logic if I bought a camera that had mushrooms growing inside it, it surely wouldn't be expected of me to ask about the possibility of it contaning such fungus would it?

I think there are some things we are allowed to surmise from the general tone of a listing and we should also expect a defect to be duly noted if it is a significant one.