thanks guys, very kind. Don't worry Paul, I'll pass on your comment to the proper authorities and I'm sure there will be a public flogging! lol

Av 99% of the time, M 0.99% and TAv 0.01% (made up stats of course, but you get the idea!)

I like Av because it's the way I grew up thinking about things with my dads MV. M obviously has its uses for situations where you want absolute control, and TAv I find fantastic for sports.

In the sport situation TAv lets you set shutter speed and aperture for the effect you want without worrying about light levels overmuch, so you have the reaction times of an automatic mode with most of the control of full manual. Obviously you have to keep half an eye on what the ISO is doing and temper your demands accordingly.

I am lucky enough to work at the UK Defence Academy, which means occasionally we get treated to some fancy flying from whatever RAF flyboys happen to be around. Yesterday was even better than usual as we were treated to a display by the fantastic Red Arrows.

Despite concerns that the MOD Police might mistake my Tamron 300 F2.8 for a rocket launcher, I took a few shots which I thought I'd share. Hope you like them, comments and suggestions welcome!

[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v68/thatguypinchedmyname/IMGP8103_filtered.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v68/thatguypinchedmyname/IMGP4054-1.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v68/thatguypinchedmyname/IMGP4040-1.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v68/thatguypinchedmyname/IMGP4027-1.jpg[/IMG]

The first one was taken with my DL2 and Dads DA 55-300, the other three with my K10D and Tamron 300mm F2.8 prime. The motion blur in shots 3 and 4 bring it home just how fast these guys fly, as they were taken at 1/500th and 1/350th respectively.

certainly it CAN take Alkalines, the problem is rather more that it can and will take a lot of them very quickly.

Lithiums are a better choice in all respects, the ability to use Alkalines should only be thought of as a last resort.

whew I'm glad I bought mine last year, I could never have justified that kind of price for one!

in any event Alkalines are not a good choice for running a DSLR. Energiser Lithiums are the only single use batteries I would contemplate.

Get 2 of these packs

http://www.7dayshop.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=777_3&products_id=103500

and you'll be set for batteries for about 4000 frames.

Alternatively if you use your camera a lot go for a set of high quality NiMH rechargeables with a similarly high quality charger

I doubt Stephan plans to shoot exclusively wide open, but he like many of us appreciates the opportunity to do so if the situation requires it. f/2.8 gives a narrower depth of field and can make the difference between getting a shot and not when you're looking at indoor sports. When I was at Uni and regularly shooting Fencing competitions I wouldn't consider taking any lens slower than f/2.8 with me, even with the K10D at ISO 1600 I occasionally had to open my 50mm f/1.7 right up to get anything at all.

it's very clever, but it does precisely the opposite of what the fast lens user is looking for!!

Potentially muchos handy for macro still life though, good find.

that's nice but isn't really a DOF effect, you'd achieve that on film using a filter.

The problem with doing DOF effects digitally is that the computer doesn't know which bits of the scene to blur. If you're very skilled it can be done manually, but it's pretty hard (I've tried it a few times but only made it look ok once).

you CAN do depth of field bluring in software, but it is difficult and rarely ends up looking good.

much better to let nature do it with a nice fast lens.

Also upping the ISO is all very well, but eventually you're going to run out of ISO range to up. If you and I have the same camera body, with super low noise ISO 6400 and SR, but my lens is 2 stops faster than yours guess what, I can still shoot in light 2ev darker than you can.

In another note, there is a common misconception that sensors will always keep getting less noisy with higher pixel counts. This is fundamentally untrue. The photoelectric effect (on which CCD and CMOS sensors are based) is a quantum effect. As such there is an in-built level of random noise which is just an inherant property of the universe in which we live. As we approach the quantum limit, R&D departments will have to put in more and more effort for less and less effect in terms of noise reduction as the factors they can alter cease to dominate. An image captured by counting a few tens or hundreds of photons at each photo site will always be noisy no matter what you do. Research grade CCDs are already at that point, so we don't have very far to go.