I'd buy the 10-20mm from Jack & a Tamron 17-50mm f2.8 - that'd give you something new with the wide angle & an upgrade at "normal" focal lengths.

Or I'd substitute the 17-50mm with a Pentax/Samsung 35mm f2 or the 35mm Da f2.8 macro. Depends if your a zoom or prime guy I guess.

I guess you're having trouble as the AF system is hunting to find focus before finally firing...

Try disabling the AF on half press of the shutter button & use the AF button instead this will help stop it hunting before firing, there is also a setting you need to enable where you can choose whether to permit shutter firing when AF isn't confirmed, I can't remember where in the menu it is though I'm afraid.

Here's a quick & dirt example of what I mean Mike.

[IMG]http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q105/RR76/mikemist.jpg[/IMG]

I've already commented on flickr & being lazy I'll just copy & paste it over here.

Mike, I just had a quick look at this in photoshop & there is buckets of detail to be eeked out of the mist.

I'm not sure how it'd work from Raw, but try dialling down the exoposure & boosting the contrast, essentially exposing for & developing the mist. The mountain in the background will also be drawn out..
Then go B&W I'd say, the green isn't adding anything so why not take it out of the equation ?

Sorry Tim...

I only suggested the half a red train in the foreground be cloned out by the way !

Looks natural to me, & you wouldn't have guessed without seeing the original.

Indeed

I would imagine it just means that discount is only applied to total spent in one transaction. You would get 100 off a spend of 1000 but couldn't then go back next week, spend another 1000 and ask for a further 150 off as you'd reached 2000.

And I thought I was popular with a dozen !

Thanks Darkmunk for expanding on my explanations. My disclaimer id that it was rather early when I was typing that.

Tiff is better but as there is cost to consider I would probably choose jpeg if there was a decent cost saving.

TIFF file sizes are larger for a reason. A JPEG is a lossy compression (which means that some info is discarded at file compression stage) - crucially this includes colours.
JPEG will be 8 bit colour depth (images made up of 256 colours)
TIFF will be 12 or 16 bit (the latter being over 60,000 colours)
To eek this extra data out would take longer & hence be more expensive.

In answer to the OP, TIFF's can be pushed further in post process without causing artefacts, but if your friend thinks that the editing will be just a few "minor tweaks" then I can't see why using JPG should be an issue.