Michele, happy belated birthday!! I didn't notice your birthday date in our birthday list. Which day was it last week? I can imagine your truck box must have been quite full. Love the camera your DH got for you! I hope you will enjoy using it. The quality of pictures that come from a great digital camera are amazing! I also want to see your clematis and other perennials you've planted over the years. Did you get the retaining wall built already? Please post before, during construction and after construction pictures of it in the gallery for all of us to see. Okay? Brenda

denp3000, well that's no fun when you can't play with us. I am not the techy wizzard here. I have a new laptop with windows vista and it works, so is it a new feature. I also have these "fn" shortcut features. I hope someone comes to your rescue with a solution real quick. I know I swear all the internet fonts were a 6 that I could barely read. LOL Jean

When I lived in San Antonio one of the high schools offered a continuing education class in welding. It was taught by a shop teacher and all the classes were in the evening. We used the equipment to several types of welding, and we were able to pick our own personal project if we wanted something done at home. We didn't develop any real skill, but we learned how to use the equipment. Bruce

Quote:"your area is so full of wonderful subjects" Years ago I drove 18 wheelers covering the entire U.S.A. Every year Labor Day seemed to open the flood gates as people began their annual vacation migration in search of something to see. But what I found most amazing is that for every person that heads out of your community there is another traveling vast distances to come see your town. To that end I used to offer people a challenge. Take out a road map of your state and locate where you live then take a simple drawing compass and scribe circles at 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 & 50 miles. Now locate all the communities within those circles and contact their chamber of commerce for information on sites to see in their community. You will find a vast wealth of sites to see, all within a short one hour commute of your house, and many of them are absolutely free of admission. Now consider how much money you can save in fuel, food and lodgings and you have just saved enough to pay for that camera or new lenses you been dreaming about, not mention that you can continue that project year around instead of trying to pack it all into two weeks. Now in regards to how long it takes to edit 1300 photos. Actually the problem is not as difficult as it might seem. I began my interest in photography with a Pentax Spotmatic, which was the first 35mm SLR to have a built in through the lens light meter. (The Nikon F offered a light meter in an accessory viewfinder and Canon had not yet got into the professional SLR market). Lenses were manual focus, manual aperture and exposure was controlled by manipulating the shutter speed and lens aperture to center a match needle indicator in the view finder. As if that was not enough, in those days most films had an ASA (ISO) rating ranging from 64 to 325. I can vividly remember when AGFA introduced a 1000 ASA B&W film for the first time, and Fuji film almost took over the industry with a 500asa high resolution color print film. In those days getting the correct exposure was at best a bit iffy so it was common practice amongst the pro's and advanced amateurs to use a technique called "Bracketing" In fact, Bracketing is an automatic feature on most DSLR's but most people fail to use it. Bracketing is a technique where you shoot one frame at the measured exposure, then a second frame one f-stop under and a third frame one f-stop over. We could then push or pull an additional f-stop in the darkroom if need be. In those days there was no "live view" or "instant replay" so that is how we could insure we would have a usable print when we processed the film. I still rely heavily on that technique when i am out in the field where it would be difficult to return and try again, especially when shooting birds or wildlife where the shots cannot be repeated. When shooting macro shots of plants & flowers on a windy day I often set the mode to "Sports" which is shutter priority mode keeping the shutter speed as high as possible. This has a two fold effect. 1. By keeping the shutter speed very high it assures stop action when the subject is moving in the wind and 2. it keeps the aperture open, limiting depth of field, which generally puts the background out of focus giving a nice soft pastel background that does not detract from the subject. Back in the days of film bracketing the exposures was rather expensive when you considered the cost of film and processing, but in this age of digital when i go in the field I carry 5 or 6 SD cards and 5 sets of batteries so I am not concerned about wasting a shot or two if I can be sure that I will ultimately have the shot i want. In addition, I generally do not take just one shot, but rather I like to shoot a series of shots that show different aspects of the subject. By example, I am attaching a series I took of the evolution of a Dandelion. My brother said i was as crazy as an outhouse rat for taking pictures of dandelions but I like the outcome. DANDILION PLANT IN BLOOM DANDILION BLOSSOM DANDILION IMMATURE SEED POD DANDILION MATURE SEED POD DANDILION MATURE SEED POD DANDILION SEEDS