I'll add my weight behind that. A cracking performer and the tele seems to be great too. Some loss of picture quality but barely noticeable. As a safari lens it was perfect. Heavy though so keep that in mind.

I wouldn't sell mine. You may have to prise one out of someone's cold dead hands...

Does HDR steal my soul!?

Morning everyone

Finally got around to picking up my copy of Photoshop Elements 9 from the post office (big thanks to the Black Friday deal heads up from members of the forum).

What I was wondering is if there are any 'must-have' plugins that I should pick up. Are there any people can't do without, or any people think greatly improve their photos (or shorten their workflow)?

I was a GIMP man before so there were a lot of plugins to recreate PSE functions and plugins.

Cheers all

WG

I got a copy. You had to follow the link to the black Friday deals. There was a kind of countdown clock. There were still copies about 15 mins after the deal started but I think they will be gone now .

Thanks for the heads up though. I have resisted buying Photoshop elements and use GIMP but at that price it was too good to miss.

'Lo All

I'm thinking of making a foray into flash photography soon. My birthday and Christmas are coming up so it seems a good time. Until recently the Metz 48 was top of my wishlist. I'm not going to need a monster or anything too complicated, but was keen on a swivelling head. The Metz 48 seemed a no-brainer in terms of value for money.

However, the Metz 50 has now been released so I am looking at both. I can't really see much of a difference between the two. Am I missing something (I probably am...).

On SRS at the moment the 48 is £135 and the 50 is £195. Can anyone give me a good reason to pay the extra for the 50, or recommend a better alternative?

Cheers,

WG

Ah yes, the cheetah is a bit frame filling. I wanted to get a shot with the environment but wasn't able to. We came upon it quickly and wanted to leave it to it's kill so didn't stay long. I found the 100mm end of the lens was a bit close but didn't have time to change it.

Looking at it I realised I posted the wrong version. It had lots of blood around it's mouth so this was the sanitised version for the in-laws (desaturating the blood and then replacing some of the colour).

Joe - Stone Town was interesting. Had fun wandering around the shops and markets. I found it hard to photograph though as it was midday and the narrow streets cast strong shadows. We were staying on the other side of the island so we didn't return in the morning/evening light.

I prefer No 1 - I think it has more impact. Great shots and a good eye to spot the possibilities.

I'm also with DrOrloff. What does it look like if cropped down to remove the heavy lines on each side (the two verticals and two horizontals)? It strikes me that removing these details might draw ones focus more towards the silhouette.

Wow, thanks everyone for the kind comments. Credit has to go to everyone's advice and tips on this site, and inspiration from your photos. Seeing the shots people post on here set the standard and give me something to aim for.

I had a quick go this morning at bringing down the blown highlights on the monkey/rain shot. A bit of experimenting with curves wasn't satisfactory - the contrast started looking unnatural. So I made a second exposure and blended the layers together.




I think that helps.

And a couple more that I uploaded.

Gwyn, I can appreciate how impressive hyenas are (eating anything, running for days on end, etc) but they aren't the most charming things. We saw one that had taken a cheetah kill and was covered by long grass. We were all hoping it would raise it's head so we could take a shot and I put the camera into burst mode in anticipation. It finally did and proceeded to flick a piece of intestine side to side covering its face and the ground around it. I have a nice flick-book effect of this...

Thanks again for all the kind comments.

Thank you Techno-terminator - you're too kind. I think it's mostly down to luck and being in the right place at the right time. We were lucky to see a lion and lioness who were mating and hence he was doing a bit of roaring. Lions seem to spend most of their time laying around... I've got quite a nice one of a juvenile lion sleeping on the road which I'll upload tonight.

It's also worth pointing out that I took a lot of shots and these are my picks. I made a lot of spectacular subjects look very ordinary...