FreeMind

Tim had already noted that the Canon 500D is a high quality close up filter that works extremely well with the Nikon 70-200 2.8 VR lens except for situations that require a perfectly flat field with outstanding corner sharpness such as doing a macro of a coin or a stamp. Of course the crop factor with a digital camera helps here too. I have no personal experience using it on the less sharp, more distortion prone 18-200 but running any of the pictures should DxO should help.

Scott, As for the right and left brain question. The left brain controls speech and is generally considered the more logical side especially in right handed people (left brain controls the right side of the body) while the right brain is considered more artsy.

Eliot

Now, is that all worth $1,000 a year?

I need to know about Skype. My husband and I are considering dropping our grounded phone service (we pay about $79 per month) and trying something like Skype. But we are scared to do for fear of reliability problems and the unknowns involved.

The price for Skype (even the high end price) is outrageously good. We would save buckets each year.

Is Skype reliable? We would buy a Skype phone and use it just like a grounded/regular phone.

Is this viable or would you recommend against it for any reason as a primary phone?

I just wanted to let know how much I enjoy your show and how addicted the show has become for me. I am now listening to episode 40 and counting, I don’t want to miss any of the action. Today I will be downloading to my phone shows 41 to 62 I hopefully I will be all caught up next week.

Thank you very much for keeping us udated on all that we need to know about digital photography, the best part is that “it is all free”.

Keep up the good work and please keep giving up prices. I love prices.

Scott,

Everytime I listen to you it seems like I am listening a very good old friend that I never had.

Regards

Luis Perez

Web Sites: http://www.giveawayoftheday.com is a website I love, I watch the RSS feed in my email client and every day it lets me know what the days software is, they give away for one day a fully working non-time-limited non-demo copy of software and it could be anything, I’ve got utilities to look after my computer and slideshow software, image effects creators and much more and all free. definitely one to watch out for.

Mark.
http://www.MarkVarleyPhoto.co.uk
http://www.TwistedPhotography.co.uk
London, England.

Great inforrmation about the 500D.

Laurel, I sent you an email. Start thinking of topics.

Landya, thanks for the link. You were right – I couldn’t find the link! You’re wonderful!

In defense of the Canon 500D: there are two kinds of close-up diopter lenses, one element and two element. The single element lenses are relatively inexpensive, and all reviews I’ve read say that they perform poorly. Two element lenses on the other hand perform much better, and of course are *not* inexpensive. The 500D is the biggest, most expensive dual element diopter around.

I use a 500D on both my 70-200VR and 18-200VR Nikon lenses with a great deal of success. I imagine I’m doing this exactly when Michael is talking about using his; situations where I don’t have room to lug a dedicated macro lens around. However, you may not save as much weight as you expect, the 500D is a monster!

For more information on close-up lenses you can read this article on the always useful “Earthbound Light” website:

http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/closeup-diopters.html

Cheers,
Laurel
Queen of all Photo Contests

I was wondering why our experiences with DNG were so different. I used Adobe Camera Raw to convert an 8mb (6mp) file to various DNG files.

I first saved as an uncompressed with Medium sized jpg. That yielded a 19.8mb file; with a Full Sized jpg it yielded a 20.6mb file.

Of course my problem was whenever I made DNG files I did not compress them. When I compressed this file it went down to 1.3mb. This seems like great news. Maybe a little too great news. If it is truly lossless, I could save a lot of space.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, and if anyone can add some information about the compressed DNGs, I’d love to hear it. It seems tempting to import as DNG’s, but I am hesitant to touch the original files.

–Michael

http://plasq.com/

In my case, my Canon Raw files are usually 9mb and once converted to DNG, they are around 6mb and that’s good!

Then again, I’m a canon shooter and I could be totally wrong here.