Wildcard:
And then tell me how to post a pics here please...........Dooohhh.
:lam:
You may need to shrink down the size of your posts, to fit the board, I did. I run a great package called thumbs plus. It allows you to view all your shots in thumbnails but has literally hundreds of other uses and functions. One of my favorites is AutoRename. This allows you to give a whole set of photos new names with one command, like "mantaray001, mantaray002... all you do is select the ones you what to name and run the command, it prompts you with what you want and presto, all your files are changed for you and numbered at the end however you want. It is shareware from Cerious Software and is by far the best shareware I have ever bought. We even use it at my work in the State of California. Very good package.
Another thing to know, every time you open CHANGE and save a JPG file you are recompressing the file. I always burn a CD of all my shots first, unchanged, mark it as such, and put it away. I then take a copy of the images to the hard drive to work with, and usually if I am going to do alot of moding and saving, I change it to a Tiff or TGA or something that is a lossless format.
The operative word here is CHANGE. You can open Jpgs all you want without changing them and just close them without loosing quality, but if you change the image even by lightening or color correction, the image has to be recompressed, and yes you loose a bit of quality.
That is another nice thing about TP. It allows you to do things like rotate an image from a right click on the thumbnail image and it does not recompress when doing it so you can fix all your rotate image shots without loss.
You can also do a BATCH process to almost anything you can do in the program so if you want to take a whole folder of shots and convert them to TGA format you can do this in one operation and walk away for a quick cup of coffee and your good to go when you get back.
Good Luck.
BTW you asked which strobe I recommend, I very much like the See and Sea YS-90DX strobe because it has the ability to adjust the output in 12 steps from full power down to about 1/8th power. This is very nice when your shooting everything from a couple 3 meters down to a macro. Very nice strobe and something I highly recommend.
What alot of people do not realize is that when your using a strobe alot of time your trying to get rid of the daylight in the shot, (because it is so filtered by the water, by the time it gets to your depth) and instead replace it with the color corrected light of the strobe, so you have to go into manual and select an exposure that would be very underexposed without the flash, and then shoot it with the flash. This gives the eye catching color in the shot that everybody wants.
I went nuts trying to get the right look on my new rig cause It was always looking like either the strobe did not fire, or it was washed out. I start at ISO 50 F8 and a 1/125 and then adjust from there. I adjust my strobe power to adjust subject brightness and my Shutter speed to lighten or darken the background. If you think about it, that works great, but you have to know this stuff or learn it from a book or another photographer.
I have been lucky enough to learn from some great photographers on the trips sponsored by Optiquatics, which is a company that just does UW Photo dive trips and classes. You can learn more in three days on one of their trips than you can in a hundred dives without help.
Ok nuff rambling....
Matt :cwmddd: