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Lots of good ways to go -- and there's a place for each. I've got a gas grill, a Weber kettle, a massive steel offset smoker, and a hybrid propane/wood-fired pizza oven. Gas is undeniably convenient, andfor some things even tastes better. Sometimes lump charcoal, sometimes oak, sometimes...

It's clearly tempting to play generational politics (in both directions), but to do so mostly reflects on the person speaking. My parents were born during the Depression, and they (and especially my grandparents) had a sense of thrift that many today would do well to learn from. At the same...

It's probably not as open and shut as the feds claim, but it's also probably not as simple as the bird photographers think it is, either. I suspect that one largely overlooked factor is that he is not only a professional who sells his own images, but a tour operator who brings in clients. That...

Keep in mind that the 35/1.8G will get *worse* on FX as you stop down further, and as the subject distance exceeds 6-8'. Inside of 8' and wider than f'/4, it's tolerable -- but beyond that, you might as well be shooting a 50/1.8, and stop wasting pixels. The 35/1.8G is *not* a general purpose...

I still use the 35/2D a lot as a walkaround and for events -- it's sharp enough centrally at/near wide open for snaps, and sharp corner to corner stopped down. The 24 is the weakest of the bunch, needing to be stopped down more than the others for consistent performance. The 85G is indeed...

That's a great characterization -- agreed all around.

I've owned both, and kept the Tamron. It's a bit sharper at the long end, and the stabilization is better. Both are great, though, and it's hard to make a bad choice.

1/8" x 1" steel bars from the bins at Home Depot. ;- ) The firebricks are 4.5" x 13", which is a little harder to find -- but worth it when trying to do a span like this. The key is having good airflow through the brick structure -- I set it up so the heat comes mainly up from the...

Glad you guys like the idea -- thanks! I need to shoot some of the new build, but here's an early draft of the grill insert version: I was actually thinking of writing a patent and building kits, but in digging around I found a company that already makes such a thing -- and they also focused...

I've become fairly obsessive about making pizza. Frustrated about the limitations of a typical residential oven, I built a firebrick chamber in my gas grill outside (the key is a combination of thermal mass and airflow -- you need both). That got me to around 700 degrees, which will produce a...

The YN560 is a purely manual flash, and it will not work with Nikon's CLS system (Commander mode). It does have an optical slave setting (S1 is instantaneous; S2 is a slight delay to compensate for pre-flashes), but you have to calculate and set the flash levels manually. They do work great...

+1 to pDuany -- all you need is the basic ~ $10 annual domain registration. Everything else is covered by Zenfolio. Your basic GoDaddy registration will also give you one email address at your domain, which can be nice to use alongside your Zenfolio account. One of the big complaints about...

Think about what you've written for a few minutes, and reconsider. If you're willing to accept the 16-85 cropped to the DX frame, you can do so with the 24-85, as well. The 16-85 adds nothing over the 24-85 on an FX camera, other than an obligation to crop.

Absolutely -- price and playability/sound do not correlate especially closely. I was helping some friends pick out very basic beginner guitars, and I was amazed at how good a very inexpensive Alvarez or Ibanez is. Another one to watch for: '80s/'90s Alvarez Yairis. My neighbor has one (a...

Very hard to say without a ballpark price range. I've got a couple of vintage Gibsons (a '41 L-00 and a '56 J-45), but there are a ton of good guitars available for pretty reasonable prices. In the $500 range, the Epiphone Masterbilts are very good, as are Seagull (if you like the flat broad...

Sigma's new OS (VR) teles aren't cheap, so I'd expect a 200/2 to be in the $3k-4k range, at minimum. Could easily be more.

Reposting for SN range: mine is fine -- SN 3023xxx.

I had a friend with a standard poodle that had a whole repertoire of pretty clever tricks: if you left a handkerchief sticking out of your pocket, and then sneezed, she'd come up, pull out the hanky, and hand it to you. If you told her to go "nightie-night", she would spread a blanket on the...

IF you mean that you went with the D600, I'm confident you'll love it. It's a great camera.

This is really the key. A poodle is a great place to start -- and you might consider mixes (Labradoodle mentioned above, or a Cockapoo for something smaller). I really dislike most small dogs, but that's a combination of the fact that most are terriers, and their owners are way too...

Indeed they can -- though there are still problems to solve. Symmetrical wides are an ongoing problem due to the difficulty of non-perpendicular light paths on shallow mounts (Leica, m43, and Sony NEX all reveal this). Still, it will be nice to see what possibilities emerge as sensor design...

I grew up playing with four of the top five, and am still tempted to cobble together a set of lawn darts from parts.... ;-)

Keep in mind that diffraction will never cause the D800 to produce an image that is inferior to that from a D600 -- there may be circumstances (well stopped down) when there isn't much improvement from D600 to D800, but the D800 will never be worse. re. processing speed: I'm running an early i7...

Nice -- thanks. I'm going to have to get one of these, too. Will be great with an iPad.

+1 for Shaun K Seller: me Buyer: ShaunK Item: Think Tank R10 Great transaction, and very easy to work with. Thanks!

Thanks for the info -- looks cool. Is it possible to shoot RAW+JPEG, and only have the jpegs sent to the device? It would be handy to transfer a lower-res jpeg for quick uploads, but still have the RAW files for later processing.

It's sad to see how little value there is in most printing equipment -- hard to even give it away much of the time. Canon FD lenses can be nice adapted (I use a few on my NEX), but the 50/1.8 is near the bottom, in terms of resale price. So it goes. ;- ( Might be worth listing the lot on...

Unless I'm reading that link incorrectly (and I can't see how), keep in mind that it will still require setting the flash exposure manually on the YN-560. All that they're reporting is that in S2 delay mode, you can trigger the YN flash as a slave -- this is itself surprising, since the CLS...

Bumping up from 35mm to 50mm on the long end doesn't sound like much, but you're asking for a 3x, rather than 2x, zoom range. That's especially tough to accomplish on an ultra-wide zoom. Furthermore, you're asking for an extra third of a stop on the wide end, and only adding a third on the long...

That's completely unrealistic -- such a lens would likely be *more* expensive than the 16-35, not less.

You'll get more for it listing separately, though there's nothing hugely valuable there. Some things would be worth reselling if they're not too musty. Is that a Vivitar 135/2 on the Canon? If so, that's worth a few bucks. Pic #2 looks like a Koni Omega medium format press camera, which is...

Weird, and frustrating, I'm sure. I've got a D600 (SN# 3023xxx) and have taken about 400 shots. I just did a stopped down sky shot as a test, and I don't see any spots. I'll keep an eye on it, and post back with any updates.

Very nice -- great shots, and I love the tonality.

No, I edited them myself, unprompted. You're not worth engaging.

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Love the shot -- fantastic lighting and composition, though I too would probably prefer to keep the top of her head. Fantastic work.

Given your stated preferences (flip locks, pistol grip head), Manfrotto is the natural choice. Very high quality, and very affordable.

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Political and not-for-profit organizations are exempt from the do-not-call list, and we get tons of them. We have an old-fashioned answering machine, so we can do very sophisticated real-time screening: if it's someone we want to talk to, we'll pick up. Maybe.

The D600 doesn't seem dramatically different from the D700 to me.

Well, I've just made the switch from a D700 to a D600. I was torn, and still am a bit -- but I think it's the right choice for me. The factors: The most demanding thing I shoot is low light musical performance. High ISO image quality is very important, and my initial results suggest that the...

I've tried the 1.4x with the Tamron, and I thought it was terrible -- worse than simply cropping, and that was on the relatively forgiving D700. Maybe someone else will get better results, but for me it was a non-starter.

They're going to have to really nail it, because if it doesn't convincingly outperform the 70-300vr (or the even better Tamron) in image quality and AF performance, it will just be a very expensive half stop.

I'm one of those who really likes the 35/2. Central sharpness is good at wide stops (f/2.2 is a lot better than completely wide open, and it improves further as you stop down. Far corners take a while to come in -- you have to be well stopped down for uniform corner-to-corner performance...

That's what I'd do.

Cine lenses are marked only in T-stops. This ensures that if you change to a different lens, the exposure will be absolutely identical. T/4 is T/4, is T/4. With advances in digital post-production, color timing is easier than it was in the film era, but it's still vastly preferable to begin...

I can't afford one, but this is a great development. Finally, after more than a decade of steady improvements in digital photo technology, we've got a full frame compact camera. This is a great step, and particularly for a first generation product, the specs on the RX-1 are very impressive...

Agreed, all around.

And for those people, it might be pretty good advice.