stevepamp

Rick I have this lens and am generally happy with it. All of the photos in my Africa Safari portfolio were taken with this lens (http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=699578) and I believe, although I didn't go back to check the XIF, that most of them were taken at or around 400mm.

My biggest gripe on this lens is that it's sloooow, and needs a lot of available light or high ISO. Max aperture goes to 5.0 at something like 135mm, and 5.6 at around 200mm so for all intents and purposes, I treat it as a 100-400 f5.6 lens.

Rick -- I live minutes away from both Bear Creek Lake and Red Rocks parks. The previous posters covered those places pretty well. I've photographed extensively at both Red Rocks and Roxborough; Roxborough is much larger and I think a bit more scenic.

<p>Bear Creek Lake you will find distinctly unimpressive, although there can be some opportunities for birding depending on the season. Frankly if my time was limited, I wouldn't waste it there.

<p>The Buffalo herd is on private land which is divided by I-70; depending on which side of the highway they're on they can either be quite close to the parking area or a considerable distance away. I don't drive by there every day, however on the occasions when I do they can also be completely absent. Hiking is not possible.

<p>Hope this helps -- enjoy your stay in Colorado.

I have travelled regularly both within and outside of the U.S. since 9/11 and have experienced no problems whatsoever with carrying on camera equipment (most recently last week when I flew to and from Honolulu via LAX with a 20D, 10-22, 17-40, and 70-200 plus memory cards, batteries, portable hard drive, etc.)

I just carry it in a backpack and run it through the x-ray machine along with my shoes, etc. I've never had any TSA personnel (or anyone else for that matter) express the slightest intrest in it.

Leon -- I have one of those devices. I have used it on several trips and found it to be reliable, but quite slow to upload CF cards (on the order of 10 minutes to upload a 512m CF card). It's pretty basic, so if all you're looking for is something to store your images so you can reuse memory cards, it should work fine so long as you have another card(s) to use while it's uploading. When I bought it, I was looking for a basic portable storage system and it was the cheapest alternative.

I personally carry about 3g worth of memory which is usually sufficient for a day's shooting, then download everything at the end of the day. Seems to work fine for that.