VWGolf

I love Color Efex. As you know, I take a lot of pictures of my Siamese cat and his chest, which is almost white, tends to burn out when I am using lights (most of the time). I've found an excellent was to recover it is to use the detail extractor in a heavy handed manner, then put a mask onto the layer, invert it, and paint back in some of the detail that has practically burnt out, using the brush at about 40-50% opacity. Lots faster and easier than mucking around dodging on a 50% grey layer. The only annoying thing was I spent £100 on it last December and a month or so later, they made it free (and even gave refunds back to Jan-16). But can't complain too much, as it's my favourite plug-in and I use it a lot (for other things too).

Vulcan 607 by Roland White about Black Buck raids to The Falkland Islands during the war. Amazing book. Bought it after meeting Martin Withers, the pilot who flew the first raid. And amazing and unassuming man whom you'd never guess was a hero who holds the DFC.

About this time last year, my son gave me a s/h iMac. It's like the one you're getting rid of, Kev, but to me it's wonderful. Not retina, and it's i5 and I love it to bits. I've upped the RAM to 24gb and I can't complain about the speed. I'll never go back to Windows 10 My desk is in my living room and my screen saver is pictures from my folder of my best photos, resized at 2560x1440. So everyone who comes in has to look at my pictures! lol But the screen size is impressive and shows every small detail. One day, I shall have a newer one, and be even more impressed. My son showed me his and the Retina is to die for. I hope you enjoy your new one

Well done, Mitch - not bad ;-) I suppose you were showing off, hand-holding your 600mm, whilst taking competition-winning shots? Not that I'm jealous or anything! ;-)

I would like both the D5 and D500 but will have to stick with my D750 or the time being ...... But consider where we were just, say, ten years ago with DSLRs, with some people saying they'll never produce the standard of pictures as could be done on a film camera. And look where we are now - even an iPhone camera takes better pictures that what we had back then. Only 15 years back, my first digital camera had 1mp and now I have 24mp, which is small fry compared to the top range Nikons and Canons (I know that measurement isn't the be all and end all, but for comparisons sake). My longest lens is an old Tokina F5.6 210mm, but I can still photograph distant things - tigers, the Vulcan, for example - and be able to crop and still get a decent picture, albeit perhaps not so good as my friends with their fancy 400 and 600mm lenses. So although 3m ISO isn't usable except in extremis now, it will probably be accepted as normal a few years down the line. Such is progress :-) Just my two-pennyworth :-)

Well seen and photographed :-)

Oops - sorry, I didn't read the rules :-(

Here's mine - is this where I'm supposed to post it? If not, please feel free to move it. :-)

Lovely, thoughtful picture - great winner :-)

Went onto fleaBay to buy A-V software as mine was about to expire. In a hurry, I chose a download (no disk). English seller, who sent me a message to download and use the Kaspersky 30 free trial, then add in the serial number he gave me. Ripped off! Kaspersky later confirmed that the serial number was an Australian one and I couldn't use it with my UK software. Because the seller had told me to use the 30 day trial, by the time I reported it to fleaBay, it was 30+2 days and they weren't interested and wouldn't help. The seller, needless to say, ignored all messages from me. So yesterday, went and bought another licence from Amazon, who delivered the disk today. I duly installed it, the serial number worked and I was happy. For about ten minutes. Kaspersky works fine, but it has removed all my browsing history, all my bookmarks and automatic sign-ins. Some of the sites I've visited have been auto sign-in for years and I can't remember my passwords! Grrrrrr! On the bright side, I found a pound coin under the radiator this morning! :-)

Signed. Yes, it's a funny thing, what you can do and what you can't. I went to a fund-raising concert at a local church hall, where I'd been asked by one of the dancers to take her and partner's picture, performing. I duly asked the person in charge if I could take their photos and was told that I could, but only them and no-one else, especially not children! And no sooner had the concert started, then every parent and a large amount of children immediately brought out their phones and tablets and proceeded to picture/film everyone in every act. Then some got sent to social media. Ironically, I bet I was the only one in that hall who been checked! Grrrr! (not that I wanted to take any pics of children or other acts, as they were mostly pretty dire anyway)

Love it! Great winner! :-)

Well deserved win :-)

Are they very precious? I tried scanning some of mine a while back and wasn't very impressed by my scans. Lot of mysterious stripes on them, though admittedly they had been left in a box, so some of the stripes were probably scratches. Good luck! :-)

Couldn't really chose anything else, could I? ;-) Picture taken 17 June. 'Classic'

I had a most unusual request at a wedding shoot yesterday. Between the ceremony and the wedding breakfast, we popped round to the couple's home (in a fab restored VW camper) in order to take pictures of the bride and groom with their two tortoises and their parent's elderly Labrador! I was happy to oblige, as I'm a great animal lover myself, but it was certainly a first for me! :-) Photos may get posted later. What was your most unusual request?

Lovely cat :-)

Well - sorted it in the end. I used collections with colour labelling. Had to colour label each pic as I added it to each collection, then set a filter on the whole catalogue to remove it once I had selected a pic for the collection. Took me a while to work it out but I got there in the end. What took a lot of time was that - unlike my mate with his 400mm lens - I was using a 70mm lens, and when it came to viewing the pics to decide whcih were keepers, I had to crop them all first, so I could see which car was which. (there were lots of similar cars/colours). This - and most of my other pics - was probably cropped to about 10% of the original picture. Good job I now have a full-frame/24mp, as I think my D300/12mp would have struggled. But at least I know next time how to sort them out quickly instead of all the muddling through I had to do this time :-) Thanks for pointing me in the right direction :-)

Thanks, Chris and Crafty :-) I don't like LR at all, but sometimes - such as with this number of pics to sort through - it's a necessary evil. I tend to find out about bits of it as I need them and whilst I knew of collections, I hadn't really looked into using them. Guess what I'll be doing next? ;-) Really appreciate your help :-)

Thanks, BP. Sadly it didn't say. I had googled to look but I couldn't find anything about it, so I'm guessing that it is not possible to name the stacks. It is possible to colour tag the pictures, which would have made it easier, but there are only half a dozen colours and there were 28 cars running, so that didn't help. I know it is possible to tag the pics, but that would still mean going through each one individually and typing in its tags. eg Golf Mk1 black, Golf Mik1 red, Corrado, Avant, etc. it would have been nice (and quicker) to drag each car into its own stack, then go through and quickly delete the non-keepers (lots of the shots of each car were similar, but as I was panning at high speed, some were sharper than others). Maybe I should make a suggestion to Adobe. But thanks for trying :-)

Having taken 1500+ pictures at the VW Sprint day today, for the first time I've decided to use Stacks in LR CC. Is there any way of naming the Stacks? (There are no faces in the pictures, mainly cars hooning around the track) TIA

Yes, saw them (via webcam) yesterday. Hope they don't get blown off before they can fly - they looked very precarious, didn't they?

Super picture - well deserved win :-)