craigowl

Yes, there's a wide spectrum of how much time one may wish to put into post-production. My wife doesn't do any - she doesnt have time - just shows the pics to the rest of us on her laptop, as they are. You have to envy someone happy enough to ensure they enjoy that kind of freedom. I pick some of my images I think are the best but have to spend a considerable amount of time tweaking. Something I read made me realise I am a "forensic photographer" - little or no art in the mix at all!! It is true and I can handle it. The truth struck me that from first owning a junk box camera in 1964, what I wanted to capture was the reality of the outdoors. Some of that fuzzy waterfall stuff done with long exposures and HDR seems like cheating to me, and I do not really like the results, but presumably an "artist" will. Each to his own.

OK dr-mat - no hard feelings. re CR2 Raw - one writer/expert on 5D mkii says he never uses it. Others say do use it. I am trying everything. At the end of the day you can make up your own mind. Doing things seriously today means spending hours stuck at your pc getting a numb backside. I can tell you, life is too short to do all that is recommended by the "experts". You will all find that time speeds up exponentially as you get older! Fact. Will you be lying on your death bed saying "I wish I had spent more time sitting at my pc/ipad, flymo-ing the grass, etc." No - certainly not. You can read hundreds of reviews on cameras on several databases if you want to spend a few valuable hours at it. Based on above posts Wendy, I would have a look at TZ20 review and perhaps save yourself a lot of time.

You are a right stirrer, Wendy! x

I was talking of Ixus merely as a compact holiday snapping camera, with potential for some enlargements. Without knowing the stats on paper, to others viewing the images from both cameras on a large flat screen Panasonic tv, they will look broadly of similar quality. Maybe you can criticise the specification of my telly now! A professional photographer picked one of my wife's Ixus efforts as a favourite on flickr. You dont need to lecture me on pixels/lenses cropping etc. Herr Doctor. At the end of the day, all the technical power of a big DSLR can mean nowt if you have not had years of experience and clicked off thousands of shots.

Did you collar any naughty lumberjacks in Canada, dinkus? Nice to hear from you!

Canon Ixus is impressive, Wendy, IMO. Ours is about 3 years old now, so it will have been updated. My wife uses it at rambling outings. I am miffed, because I went into Canon DSLR from 30D to 5D Mk2 and her pics look as good as mine, technically, at a fraction of the price and in a neat small package of a camera. Dr Mat knows a lot about cameras IIRC. Best regards Iain

Snail trail- new to me, but love that one, sean!

Hairdresser and lady lawyer's car, from what I see in the cities. My GP (quite macho, huntin' shootin' fishin' guy, actually) got rid of his after a few months. Regular coilpack failures then. Trouble was, if you needed replacements, waiting list - not enough available from our teutonic friends' factory. Like the look of Dr B's new Subaru 4wd estate, though! I see our 80-something neighbour who was MD of a bus factory in Falkirk (Camelon) after numerous new Passats every two years has now gone Japanese hatchback!

"VAG development engineers thwarted by fundamental windscreen wiper, door handle, headlight switch, coilpack, sunroof, etc. design - shock! horror!" "Germans? - Do you a good pair of binoculars, though, they will." (Line from 1970s tv sitcom, I recall).

I can't help laughing, tentonhammer, thinking about you with steam coming out of your ears while these two orifices of the law sniff around your car looking for stuff to find fault with. Glad I'm an old git and that you got off free! lol!

Ha! ha! - you certainly fooled me!

I am very much liking your vay of thinking, my friend. Barnes-Wallis lives!

Mine is on with a couple of dabs of JB Weld at the back. This ensures that the tealeaf gets part of a broken grill, too. Hey - wait a minute....!

It can't get stones out of horses' hooves IIRC.

That's p!$h news about your job, Alex. Good luck - remember, "you can't keep a good man down".

Thanks for that! Legendary product. Folks my age knew what WD40 stood for and its place in space age technology. Only thing I found - as hay fever sufferer - was that the nice smell some of you guys speak of, aggravated my beak, it seemed to give the pollens extra power! Maybe someone else can relate to that, seeing as allergies have escalated by hundreds of percent since I first had WD-40 in 1972. Nice to read - above - that it allegedly contains nothing harmful. I was never sure and always avoided getting it onto my skin in case it was absorbed and gave you liver cancer or summat - like that carbon tet solvent we knew until the 60s, which apparently killed a number of cleaning ladies! I used cans of it under, in the wheel arches, etc, etc, of our new Opel Manta! Even today that niff reminds me of my introduction to the stuff and that car. Today, I still have about 3 cans in the house and garage, but I like the silicon products a bit more for some things.

Two surveys showed that the best quality of life in the UK are to be found in Perth and - a very recent one this - Shetland! Personally, I like the sunshine, but not great heat - the Underground in London was like a baker's oven at times when I was down there in the 1960s. Sun ain't everything as I found when living and working in the "home counties" for several years. Yorkshire seemed a good compromise for me.

Maybe the police you saw are racist or jealous of guys with relatively expensive cars? Heaven forbid! I grew up with scumbags who hated people who had anything more than them - or were vindictive if you were academically brighter. Seems like mankind will always be cursed with sh!t like this. Best just to philosophise, get on with enjoying life when you can and leave the cities when you can.

Statistics are OK unless in the hands on non-specialists, or those with an axe to grind. Actually, the last ten years or 30 years as a whole does not matter in the affected parts of England. It is the last 2 or 3 years which play the major part in developing the drought. As a professional meteorologist for the past 47 years and involved in rainfall measurement and mapping in Scotland since 1978, you can rest assured that our Met office's maps give a good representation of the facts. Also, I have maintained a daily rainfall record at my home since 1978 and inherited another record back to 1956 from our town's Burgh civil engineer (water). Just because a couple of lows are giving bitter winds and squally showers this week does not mean that Yorkshire's ground water is up to normal. The millions of gallons of good water lost every day due to the much needed and costly replacement of Victorian water mains does not help. With the pipeline from Loch Katrine, Glasgow's main water supply transformed overnight in about 1840 from often fetid wells in the city to one of the purest in Europe. I visited people at these works several times and they all said we owe a great deal to our Victorian ancestors, but we are baulking at replacing the infrastructure as it would "cost too much". Mains are replaced as they fail bigtime, but many leaky ones will have to wait. Clearly, this situation is more serious in parts of the UK with relatively low rainfall. Most Brits and water-dependent industries are in the driest parts of Britain. The Scottish and Welsh hills and the Lake District can catch up to 8 times more rainfall than Essex some years. Our Loch Lomond holds enough water to last Scotland about 40 years - assuming no rain fell again - so the water authorities tell us. Too dry where you are? Simple, move northwest. Move northwest and uphill for even more! "You never miss the water till the well runs dry." ---------- Post added at 2:22 PM ---------- Previous post was at 2:20 PM ---------- Ha! Ha! - nice to know you Gus! ---------- Post added at 2:26 PM ---------- Previous post was at 2:22 PM ---------- ..worked with rainfall data for 34 years. No one in the Met Office that I knew of had any motive other than quantifying data from properly certified standard stations. This is not America, where immoral scientists have represented, say, tobacco and oil companies with slanted information. OK - be paranoid in these mad times, but make sure of your facts. Every person in the street thinks they can be the expert in a free country like ours, but only good data interpreted by accredited and well-informed specialists will get you near or at the truth.

Small country ours, but tremendous variation in weather/climate in short distances. Last year - 2011 - was our wettest on record, here. We had about 130% of normal. Much of England had a large deficit.

Sorry to hear about mindless vandalism to your car, Doc F. I know you worked hard to get where you are. Best regards Iain

anne t has emailed me just before you, easypops, to arrange to pickup. Thanks for offer anyway. Cheers Iain

Available now, over weekend or it goes to Daltons. (Seems maybe everyone's more well-off than they used to be?)

Ah - I know Exactly where. Didnt recognise name Daltons. New battery - Varta Siver D15 just this minute delivered. £70.99 from Mr Singh in Glasgow. Excellent firm. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190639411573&ssPageName=ADME:L:OU:GB:1123

Hey, thanks for that, Anne - or should I call you "streetwise Bairn"? lol. Ok if no-one comes for it from the forum I will look this place up.