homer_arment1

<p>Paint Shop Pro used to come pretty close to Photoshop. I use the stand alone Lightroom for all my post processing.</p>

<p>Corel's Paintshop Pro X7 is another you might consider. It has been a few years since I used it but it always seemed to be able to do most of whatever Photoshop could do and it was under $100 in price. You can find it online now for around $50-$70 and no monthly vig to continue using it.</p>

<p>I would think you could still find a custom lab that remembers how to make prints from negatives "the old fashoned way" on silver based paper.</p>

<p>CamRanger would also let you do it but it requires you to use an ipad or an android phone/tablet to trigger the release. It does connect through the USB connection on the D300 instead of the ten-pin connector though. Depending on how critical the timing of the shutter release is you might also be able to use the time delay mode on the camera. I've used it in the past for landscape photography.</p>

<p>There are a number of useful Lightroom videos here on Photo.net as well as YouTube.</p>

<p>It looks like Adobe is trying pretty hard to get rid of the 'stand alone' version of Lightroom. I failed to find a link to it too.</p>

<p>They have a trial version you can just try it and see. All it will cost you is the download time.</p>

<p>I always worry much more about bending a pin with my CF cards than I do about breaking a SD card. As for as problems with cards, I've had many more corrupted files after shooting on SD cards than I have on CF cards. I really wouldn't be surprised to see CF cards pushed out of digital camera usage,</p>

<p>There are probably still folks around who will create a custom profile for you for a fee. I don't know of any offhand but a Google search should turn up some likely individuals.</p>

<p>Although I've never used one, I've heard a gimbal head is good for birding.</p>

<p>I wasn't implying any disagreement with your post. My experience with Tamron lenses has also been that they are a bit soft at the long end. Sometimes more than just a bit. I would also advise to only buy one from a source that will let you return it if you are not satisfied. That said, if I could convince my wife to let me get one I'm sure I could find some room in my camera bag for it.</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/nikon-camera-forum/00cTBY</p>

<p>Here is a link to a review of the Tamron 150-600 that was posted to this site back in March of this year. The reviewer sounded pretty happy with the optical quality of the lens and the pictures posted taken with it looked pretty good to me.</p>

<p>I recently purchased a Dell XPS 8700 with Windows 7 Professional installed instead of Windows 8 and I've been happy with its performance. It boots quickly and is very quiet. There is room inside for an additional two hard drives and it isn't too difficult of a job installing them. I don't recall how many (if any) open expansion slots are available inside expansion purposes. The big selling point for me was the abundance of USB3 ports available on the XPS 8700. I would like to have a more robust power supply in the box but currently I am not taxing the standard issue one. My computer has only 12 Gigs of internal memory and the standard Dell provided video card but since I am not into games I haven't felt limited by either of those items.</p>

<p>After cleaning out all the 'crapware' I ran a registry optimizer/cleaner and have not noticed any slowdown. I currently use it for photography using Lightroom 5 and Photoshop (latest non-cloud version) as well as some simple video editing with Premiere Elements 12 and it handles those chores quite well. </p>

<p>A final note is that you are not required to get extra memory and add-ons from the good folks at Dell. You can buy compatible memory and add-ons from any number of non-Dell sources and either install them yourself of find some local Mom & Pop computer repair person to do the deed for you. I imagine the good folks from Geek Squad at Best Buy would be happy to take your money for performing such a service if you don't feel comfortable doing it yourself. I have added an additional HDD to my XPS 8700 and plan to add an internal BluRay/DVD recorder as well as an additional internal HDD soon. The case is easy to open and it is fairly easy to get at things once inside. The provided How-To instructions are very helpful too.</p>

 

<p>Great attitude Roy! Now go have fun with your camera.</p>

<p>Here is a review from the internet. It covers version 1 of the card's software and it isn't very impressed with the cards software nor the transfer speed of the card. He also mentions the card is a battery drainer. I imagine both the FlashAir and the Eye-Fi card are about the same since they are both pulling juice from the battery to give you the WiFi access. The review was posted back in Aug of last year. That is very nearly a lifetime in internet years (or digital camera years too I suppose).</p>

<p>http://www.cultofmac.com/242043/toshiba-flashair-promising-but-ultimately-flawed-review/</p>

<p>Mike, it is likely the buffer size is the same on both the 300 and the 7100 but you are just pushing twice as many pixels with the 7100.</p>

<p>I have used an older NEC P221W for several years now and have had only good experience with it. I use the I1Photo for the calibration chores as well as for my printer calibration however this would be outside your calibration budget. That said, I would think the Color Munki should be able to provide the monitor and printer calibration services you want on either the NEC 24 incher or the Dell U2413. I think the only other calibration hardware solution in your budget range would be the Spider which you would rather avoid. The Color Munki seems to be a popular calibration solution and I would be surprised if you don't hear from several people that have used it for calibrating either of these two monitors.</p>

<p>I wouldn't bother with the Spectraview software for the NEC as I didn't think it did the job any better than the profiling software that came with my I1Photo.</p>

<p>On the other hand if you have a USB3 port and a USB3 card reader, it will be able to take advantage of a faster card for downloading your images to your computer.</p>

<p>If your computer has a cd/dvd burner (most do these days) it is a pretty simple job to to the transfer yourself.</p>

<p>My wife's D90 locks up from time to time but it seems to be the lens not seating against its contacts properly. Usually gripping the lens and trying to rotate it just a little to the right and left will take care of things.</p>

<p>Beautiful images all. Thank all of you for sharing. Roberta, outstanding job on the butterflies.</p>

<p>Lightroom has picture packages that do much of this already. It also lets you roll-your-own package with the sizes and layout exactly like you want and save them for future use.</p>

<p>The CamRanger is very much a 'Beta' product (on the Android at least), When you click on the Manual selection in the App you get a page that says 'Coming Soon'. Most of the feature seem to work OK although the focus doesn't seem to work well at all. It does a search then stops at the near end of the lens focus range. I always need to use the manual focus buttons and they just seem to get close to the focus point and are not as accurate as I would like. I don't know if my changing the focus from the mid-way shutter press to the button on the rear of the camera has anything to do with this or not. That is something I plan to check on today. The CamRanger also doesn't seem to transfer the images from my camera's card to my Android either. It shows me the live view and lets me magnify the live view image with a double tap on the Android screen. It may just be I don't have something checked correctly but without a manual it is difficult to tell. I've watched a number of UTube videos and the Introduction one by the folks at CamRanger would be very useful but it doesn't seem to have any sound with it and the presenter goes a bit too quickly for me to really tell exactly what selections he is making. Overall I rate it as useable but not initially user friendly for the Android. I'm am trying to use an Asus tablet with the CamRanger on a D300 My sister-in-law is visiting with her IPad and tomorrow I will try using it with the CamRanger to see if that App works better. I also worry that some of it may be that the D300 that I am using it on is just an older Nikon and some of the selections may work differently with it than on the newer models. </p>

<p>I will be happy to see it get out of beta I think!</p>

<p>Thanks to all that took time to respond to my query. It seems on balance like something that I will use quite a bit so now I have one unit winging (well FED-EXing) its way to me. Hopefully I will still be as positive after using it for a couple days.</p>

<p>Thanks. Yes that 'beta' bothers me a bit too since I will be using it with an android tablet. I'll just have to hope it moves rapidly to a stable version.<br>

HLA</p>