I really enjoy shooting, and have shot targets with small bore and full bore rifles since I was at school. I still use an airgun for pest control and plinking in the garden.

The interesting thing is that it is very good training for photography, taking handheld shots, when most others would give up. Bracing the camera, holding breath, even slowing heart rate, gently sqeezing the shutter release, it's just the same technique and very effective.

Yes, Shake reduction takes it even further, but I'd still use a tripod if I have one with me.

I was hoping that if I followed for long enough, someone would say what this is. OK, I guessed it was a SIGMA, and that it zoomed to 500mm, but now I know it's the 50-500mm.

I have the older 170 to 500mm 35mm film lens. It's prety chunky. Is the "BIGMA" that much better : I know it covers the 50- 200 range as well, but for the size, I'd still have a 50-200mm lens for most of the time, just get the big one out when I really needed it.

Cheers

Malcolm

I'm doing that just now. Made things a bit dificult for myself by making it dual boot, XP and Vista. Then decided to add Linux, as there are a lot of guys at works who advocate Linux. Having trouble with the Boot Manager (GRUB) just at the moment, but with a bit of help, should be able to sort that.

I went for an Intel E6600, then reading various web reviews, found that it can be overclocked from 2.4GHz to 4GHz and still stable. Don't think I'll go that far, but it is by far the most clockable of the Core Duos, and if you go to http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/cpu/charts.html?modelx=33&model1=432&model2=433&chart=186 site, it turns in a pretty good performance without overclocking. the E6400 is no slouch, and quite a bit cheaper. If you really want to pare costs, then the Intel D915 or D925 would be a good bet. I always used to use AMD, but they can't touch Intel at the moment.

I decided that 2GBytes memory should be sufficient, but there is room on the MB for another couple of slots.

For disks, I decided on 3 x 320GB, so I could raid a striped pair. This effectively doubles the disk read/write speeds, but does have the disadvantage that a single disk failure can trash the contents of both disks. As Mongoose says, mirror raid only protects against a disk failure, but a lot of corruptions are replicated faithfully onto the mirror. Just make sure that you always have a CD/DVD backup. The third disk is used to take snapshot backups of the Operating Systems and other important data, so I can restore any corrupted part easily. As its the identical to the other 2 disks, it can also be used as a spare if one of them should fail.

As for Vista, I decided on the 64bit version, and most of the drivers for the hardware are not on the support disks and have to be downloaded from the manufacturer's website (this is the same for the 32 bit version). I'm sure that there are some flaky drivers in there somwhere, it's not as stable as XP, and forces more validations than XP.

Cheers

Malcolm

PS, let us know what you decide, and how you get on.

Problem is that most people don't look at the graphs, just the score at the end of the article. It was only when I saw the score and read the conclusions that I thought "well, why is it so bad, and how does it differ from the others". Then I read the graphs and wandered how Andrew came to that conclusion. The only thing he said that was true was that the Pentax lens was not as wide as some of the others.

Cheers

Malcolm

Happy birthday yesterday, Liam. If you keep this up, you'll soon be as old as me (and a few others around here). I can't quite manage the 62, but give me another month...

Why didn't somebody tell me about the wallies before?

My posting is just a bit erratic, I haven't gone away, just wrestling with building a machine with Vista. Maybe at this venerable age, I'll give up Windows and go Linux.

I don't know whether Peter or I would take the title of the oldest of the Southerner's Beano.

Cheers

Malcolm

Whilst ephotozine has a photo gallery, the normal level of critique is "5 people like this photo" or "Great colours, good photo". There is generally no serious attempt to be critical, either constructive or destructive, it's just generally a comment.
If I submit a photo to ephotozine, I would not expect to get critical evaluation from people I know and respect, whereas, here I would and it would normally be much more useful.

I think I'm getting the hang of this. Here are some of the photos I took. Same fence, same Cathedral, but very different shot, Liam.













My first published pictures, so I guess (cautiously) any comments gladly accepted.
Cheers
Malcolm
__________________________
Life? Don't talk to me about life!

Liam, I can't access the photo you've posted of the group.

Thanks for the privacy. I've never used my real name first or last on any postings, here or elsewhere, but I may change that, just for my first name.

Tim, I meant to say last night, I'll never look at a duck's ass in the same way again. Terrific shot, I looked at the time and didn't see the beauty you captured.

Cheers

Malcolm

Not a peep out of Taliety yet! I'm still working on it. Finally got the computer to run SilkyPix and PhotoLab, but still a bit slow. All I've got to do now is find somewhere to host them, et VOILA, I hope to have a few pics up tomorrow. Sorry, no mug shots, but I could enhance one and produce a reasonable collection of enthusiats

Just discovered how amazing RAW is to work in. JPEGs just don't compare. Glad I was saving in RAW and jpeg, or I'd have thrown this lot.

I'll need it, havn't tried this before, but thought it the safest way to progress to Vista. I've only upgraded to XP recently, since my W98 photo machine got sick.

I always mean to upgrade a box after a year, get a cheaper faster processor, change the OS, etc, but always get there and think, "well it's working OK now, don't mess with it". In the early days did quite a bit of overclocking, until I broke this machine fairly comprehensively. It's not really worth it now.