[Dean]

As always Tom, I enjoy your pics. One question that comes to mine is the vibrant greens your pictures display. Your pictures have such a lush rich color to them, particularly the greens and the blues. Is this normal with the G-2 or do you enhance them with photoshop? Thanks for always sharing your efforts.

[Tom]

Thanks Dean. The only adjustments I usually make in photoshop are a levels adjustment. This basically adjusts the brightness / contrast of the picture but can have the side effect of making colors look more vibrant due to the improved clarity. I didn't make any major color adjustments or boosts to saturation to the Gold Lake pictures. I thought the green on some of the pictures looked a little "much" and actually reduced the saturation on a couple of them.

[Backpacker Joe]

Hey Tom, what digital camera would you recommend? I'd like to get into one say at least 3.3 or highter mega rating? I liked the soneys' that used their mini read write cd's, but they seem to be discontinued! Thoughts! TB

[Tom]

Kind of like which car should I buy . It depends on a lot of factors. Do you like to shoot macros? If so, Nikon might be your best choice. Are you the "point and shoot" type who doesn't want to have to think about anything? If so, Sony may be the one for you (but uses proprietary memory stick and has issues oversaturating colors, particularly reds). Do you want a lightweight camera with excellent picture quality? The Canon S30 or S40 might be your best choice (but has a fairly wimpy battery). I'd recommend the Canon G2 if it were not for the fact it's already a year old (G3 is likely to be out soon), and I know you are a gram counter (G2 weighs over a pound). I suggest you do some research at www.dpreview.com.

[Backpacker Joe]

Looks impressive. How do you find the battery holds up? Do you carry spares? What memory type are you using, and what size? Army tanks for the info. TB

[Tom]

BPJ, the battery on the G2 lasts an eternity. I carry a spare just in case but I run out of memory before I run out of battery. I carry 512 MB of compact flash memory and almost always run out. Then again I take a lot more pictures than the average person - usually 2 or more of the same shot, particularly if it's a composition I like.

[Backpacker Joe]

That in itself (even by todays standards) is a hell of a lot of memory. What does that chip cost? I like sonys mini disc! TB

[MCaver]

I've found that with my Olympus E-10 I can take ~100 photos before my 4 rechargable AA batteries are drained. The E-10 is known to be rather power hungry, though. I shoot a lot of photos on the trail, so I usually pack 3 sets of 4 AA for a day trip and I usually come home with batteries to spare. I have been known to shoot in excess of 1Gb of photos on a particularly good weekend though. I only carry a 64Mb card, but I also carry a MindStor (used to be called Digital Wallet) -- basically a portable 6Gb hard drive with a PCMCIA slot. I have a PCMCIA adapter for my memory card, so I just shoot until the card is full (~25 photos), hook it into the MindStor via adapter and download the photos to the hard drive. Rinse and repeat. The MindStor also runs on recharables, but I can go weeks without juicing it up. Definitely not for the gram-counters, though. My tripod, camera and accessories weigh around 25lbs. Yes, I'm crazy. Olympus E-10 MindStor

[Tom]

[Hiker Boy]

I use an Olympus C3020Z, 3.2 MP and 3x optical 2.5x digital zoom. I added a lens adapter and stepup ring so I could put a circular polorizing filter on it. I have a 62MB Smartmedia card in it and rechargeables that go forever. I bought it because it offered the most bang for the buck.

[Alan Bauer]

There is no better way to get the greens and rich browns in our natural world to really pop and represent what our eyes see than to warm them up a bit for the film media being used. To that, I am someone who has a warming filter on every lens all the time...yes, all the time. Just a slight warming effect, mind you, in the 81a filter will create your images to be so rich. Take an image of a forest scene with and without one and look closely...you'll never switch back. Take an image of a marmot and compare with and without...same thing. Best filter I own to handle polarization is a warming polarizer such as the Moose Filter. Best of both worlds! If I don't have a warming filter on I have nothing...UV and Skylight filters are just extra glass to degrade an image and do nothing critical to help out...they are only pushed as "save the front of your lens!" add-ons by the salespeople of the world. Digital adds a bit of a challenge to this in that filters are not as easy to come by for P&S digital cameras. While I have a warming polarizer I can use on my Nikon Coolpix 5000, most often I just want the warming effect. This can be done if you have a camera that allows you to set a custom white balance on it. If you do, then go to the hardware store and get a pale blue paint chip from the paint color charts. By setting your white balance to this pale blue color (i.e. telling the camera that is what to represent as white) then your images will be taking out that blue cast that the sky gives to subjects, aka a warming filter effect! It is a wonderful trick and those paint cards are free...I just have one in my pocket with me. The Coolpix 5000 is a great camera except it sucks batteries badly. THis has finally be addressed with a new battery pack which will give me the ability to shoot much longer. I have a 640mg CF card I shoot with and a 320mg backup. Lastly, going digital SLR is a near term change for me coming up. My Coolpix 5000 is a compliment to my normal shooting slides with my Nikon lineup of cameras. The new Nikon D100 is very interesting to me, and being I don't shoot wildlife action much the slower "fast shooting" speed of 3fps bursts isn't much of a factor, so I don't need to spend the extra $1600 for the Nikon D1h. The Fuji S2 also is a great camera and accepts all Nikon lenses. Both are < $2000 now as well. Can't wait to move on up to that universe soon!

[Hodgeman of BC]

Anyone have any experience with negative scanners? I was looking at a couple from Minolta. http://www.how2scan.com

[Brian Curtis]

I have the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II. I have been very pleased with it. Its biggest drawback is that it doesn't have a bulk loader. It will scan 4 slides at a time and that works out to a decent compromise. At the time I purchased it, it was the cheapest film scanner that had FireWire. I don't even want to know how long it would take to transfer high resolution scans over USB.

[Hodgeman of BC]

Hmmm.... My 'photo guy' was talking about one, that will suck in an entire uncut roll of negs. I'll have to get a little more info

[Brian Curtis]

If you want to scan lots of uncut rolls of negatives it would be well worth spending the extra money to get a scanner that could feed them automatically. In the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite II the negatives would have to be cut into segments before scanning.