john_ampe

The D40 is perfectly fine as a manual camera in this situation. I used mine the other night to photograph the lunar eclipse.

 

If you are using the kit lens, put it on the "M" setting and focus at infinity. Next choose "A" mode, and use the command dial to set the aperture (on the kit lens, as wide open as you can get it; around f3.5 at 17mm). Those settings are all set and won't change. Now switch to "M" mode and play around with different exposure lengths, as mentioned above. After taking an image, use the LCD screen to zoom into the highlights to make sure they are not overexposed.

 

I think Nikon also recommends turning on the noise reduction setting for long exposures; I really did not experiment with that.

Roland, I bought a LaCie 250GB firewire drive last week, and am returning it today. My first attempt to format it resulted in bad block errors, and I've had numerous bad block and data corruption errors since. It's unusable. I think I'll look around for something with a fan.

Instead of making things up, please respect the author's wishes by checking the copyright policy of the site first. It's easy to do:

 

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Section 2 of the subscriber agreement says this:

 

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The authors make money when the site makes money, and the site makes money when people go there. The site doesn't make money when the copyrights are violated by unauthorized distribution. I'm sure any professional can easily understand this.

How can we as photographers expect others to respect our copyrights when fail to respect the copyrights of others?

<P>

A simple <A href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/30/nyregion/30deport.final.html">link</A> will do the trick.

Of course the F-100 is the better camera. The F-80 has 95% of the features of the F-100, but it sure doesn't have the build quality. While many people never have a problem with their F-80's, mine has had numerous failures and has spent more time in the shop than out of it. My F-100 has been flawless. Add in the little things like faster auto-focus, better low-light auto-focus, brighter and bigger viewfinder, and faster flash-sync and I would say that if you can afford the F-100, then it's a no-brainer: get it.

So Kodak is killing their only 400 speed film that was acceptable for scanning portraits. Maybe it's part of their digital conversion strategy: if they stop selling decent film, everyone will be forced to switch to digital. Guess it's time to try Fuji...

Bob,

 

That's exactly right -- using different partitions on the same disk does nothing to relieve the main problem of seeking between different files on the same disk. In fact, Adobe's knowledgebase note on optimizing Windows performance stresses repeatedly the importance of keeping the scratch file and paging files on separate disks, but make no mention at all of using separate partitions:

 

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/12dde.htm

Bob,

 

The reason two disks improve performance more than going to a faster disk is because it's not the transfer speed that kills you, it's the seek time. Ideally the PS scratch file and the OS page file are each located in contigous areas of the disk. So the disk doesn't spend much time seeking when accessing one or the other. But when you ask it to access both areas simultaneously, it spends most of its time seeking (moving from one area to the other), and very little time actually transferring data. You'll see this happen in PS when it seems to freeze up and take a few minutes to do something that normally takes a few seconds. If you watch the Task Manager's performance meter at this time, you'll see that there is almost no CPU activity, and you'll also hear your disk grinding away like crazy -- both symptoms of excessive seek activity.

 

I recently added a second disk to use for my OS page file (since my old machine is maxed out on RAM), and it's my impression that these freeze ups have ceased. However, I have not run any quantitative comparisons. And as everyone else has stated, the best fix is always to add more RAM.