Tamas Rudnai wrote: >> http://www.mixbook.com/photo-books/nature/the-path-less-traveled-by-5007796 > > Very nice album Olin! I really like the pic from Banff, one of the > most beautiful place in Earth. Thanks. Most pictures you see of Banff are of Lake Louise, but I think Morraine Lake is prettier and definitely a lot less overrun. By the way, that picture supports Joe's point a bit. I learned photography by hiking uphill bothways barefoot in the snow, with a all manual camera with no light meter or any electronics. That morning at Morraine Lake was below freezing. The battery in my Nikon F3 was apparently near the end of its life. It worked the previous day, but it was much warmer then. The built in exposure meter and the electronic shutter release didn't work. Fortunately the F3 has a manual shutter release lever that is fixed at the = X sync speed of 1/80 second. It was really useful to be able to fall back on the manual camera experience and look at the lighting and the scene and tak= e a good guess at the right F stop. The film was Kodachrome 64, so there wasn't a lot of exposure latitude. I finally retired the F3-T this December after over 28 years of good servic= e when I got a D3S. The D3 does a lot of cool things that the F3 never could= , but when the battery fails you're dead in the water. Of course you know that, so you go out with a fully charged battery or carry a spare. Everything has its tradeoffs. The F3 could run out of film just as well, s= o you carried a spare roll. Not really much different. I'm still getting experience with the D3. I don't have a good feel yet how quickly I run down a fully charged battery, especially with the GPS in use. I also still find myself taking the camera from my eye after snapping a picture and reaching for the winding lever. I never had a auto winder, so I'm not used to being able to keep looking thru the camera and taking successive pictures. I'm looking forward to the D3 being a extension of my mind and body like the F3 was, but I've got a way to go yet. The D3S is a really great camera, although a bit of a tank. The low light capability is totally amazing. It can shoot at ISO 1600 with no degradation, at ISO 3200 with only slight noise, and at ISO 12800 (yes, twelvethousand eighthundred!) with noise about equivalent to film grain, bu= t at higher resolution than you could reasonably scan the same film frame at. So now I can get more ultimate usable image information at 5 F stops more sensitivity compared to using ISO 400 color negative film. That opens up a lot more possibilities, like useable handheld shots with a 300mm lens (like these taken at ISO 3200: http://www.embedinc.com/temp/0215.jpg, http://www.embedinc.com/temp/0217_1.jpg). Of course most of the time I kee= p the ISO set to 1600, which is still 2 F stops more than I'm used to at higher resolution and significantly less noise than 400 negative film. All them there technolergy stuff really works! ******************************************************************** Embed Inc, Littleton Massachusetts, http://www.embedinc.com/products (978) 742-9014. Gold level PIC consultants since 2000. --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .