JPEG question
 

Hi, Taking a new digital SLR to Africa for safari. Noticed that on JPEG normal shooting I get about 250 pics per 1gb card, but for JPEG fine I get only about 70. Is JPEG normal ok for the stuff I will be shooting there, or should I be using JPEG fine? It is just amateur type stuff, not looking to spend my time taking millions of pics, more likely will be shooting my father and law and myself and the scenery, and with a 200mm lens getting as good shots as possible of the animals. I don't imagine ever blowing anything up bigger than 8x10 or so.
thoughts?
thanks!

If you don't want to take 'millions' of pics, shoot at the higher quality level. In your place, I wouldn't like to assume that I wouldn't be lucky enough to score an image worth making into a <i>quality</i> enlargement bigger than 10x8, or even getting published in a glossy. You'll lose nothing by taking the precaution but could disappoint yourself if you don't.

Have you considered a small portable storage device so you can download your images and clear your cards in a matter of a few minutes every day? There are plenty of makes and capacities available.

John

Just wondering..... Isn't that 70 for RAW and 250 for JPEG fine? Or what kind of camera do you have?!

(Another possibility is that the question should be &quot;What kind of camera do I have?&quot;)

As a real amateur I second John's conclusion. Shoot JPEG fine just in case you regret it if you don't. You may be surprised with the shots you get.

The camera is a nikon D80; it is my first digital camera after years of shooting on a canon rebel SLR film camera, so the compression concept is new to me, although I am going to take a short class about digital. The camera will shoot in RAW alone, or JPEG basic, normal or fine, or it can be set to take two images with each shot, one RAW and one of the JPEG choices. I only experimented with the JPEG fine and normal, not with the RAW, and came up with the number of pics I mentioned. The guidebook said the RAW settings was for using the shots on a computer, and that in most cases the JPEG normal was the best choice, but I agree with your idea of shooting in JPEG fine in case I get something special. So I think I will look into a small storage device.

FYI, if you have an iPod, you can buy a small converter that, along with the UBS cable, will allow you to download your pictures for storage. It costs $20-30. Everyone on my trip to Peru was borrowing that little thing. Of course, you have to have the photo iPod or better.

Also, take extra cards just in case something happens.

The Nikon d80 is a 10 mp camera and the size of jpeg fine is 4,8 mg per photo.The nef(raw) file is 12.4 mg per photo.

In this case Kimburu is right,with a 1 gb card you should make around 70 photos when you shoot nef and over 200 shooting jpeg fine and that would be jour choice as others said.

Take a portable device storage like John said,so you wont be worried to run out of space.

Paco.

If you are shooting jpeg always shoot at the highest quality. Especially on a trip like a safari. You may not want large prints, but highest quality means you can crop your photos without too much loss of quality (and with a 200mm lens you may find you want to crop). In low quality you can't.
And what if you take a real humdinger of a photo that you want poster size - but you shot it in low quality jpeg?
Take at least one more card with you. Don't forget to format them in the camera, and re format after downloading your photos.

I agree with hetismij - shoot large fine jpg. You should get 200 photos per 1 gig card, not 70. You may likely want to crop you photos for better subject size. Easy to do, if you don't have a program to do it, try IrfanView. Very versatile program for image cropping and color corrections and FREE. Forget about RAW for now.
How many SD cards to take? Cards are cheap now, yesterday I bought a 2(two) gig Kingston SD card at Frys Electronics (USA) for $18. (Sale good through 3/20). $$$$ wise it is reasonable to buy several cards versus a back-up/download storage gizmo. Maybe. A storage device is another piece of kit to learn how to use, hope it is working, keep battery charged, and have problems. Remember extra battery (or two) for the D80.
regards - tom

thanks for all that great info.

Also consider only shooting RAW. All digital SLR cameras support their own RAW file format. This really does open up some additional functionality/features that are not available in JPEG, such as the ability to alter the white balance after the fact. In a JPEG, once the photo has been taken, it is already 'baked' into the image. Granted, with programs like Lightroom you can still change this, but RAW files are much more functional, at the cost of storage space.

As a recent RAW convert, I totally agree with Andy that RAW is far superior because it is so much easier to adjust things like white balance after the fact. In fact, I doubt I will ever shoot anything important in JPEG ever again. But to shoot RAW, you need (a) to have a good understanding about how to use whatever RAW conversion software you are going to use (b) the patience to convert all your pictures before being able to show them to someone (c) large, high speed memory cards (I use Sandisk Extreme III 4GB cards) and (d) a portable storage device with a lot of capacity (I use the Hyperdrive HD Space 100GB). If you are willing to put up with all of that, RAW will give you the best-quality images, and will also allow you to salvage marginal pictures more easily than you could have if they had been shot in JPEG. However, I think the statements made by Jenack suggest to me that large/fine JPEG is the better way to go for this particular instance. The numbers of pictures per card quoted suggests to me the difference between JPEG and RAW+JPEG, because the Nikon D80 has the same resolution as the Digital Rebel XTI, and using a 4GB card, I get about 900 large fine JPEGs, and using RAW only I get just under 400 (depending on ISO setting and other factors).
Chris

Chris-

Can you tell me more about 'the patience to convert all of your pictures before showing them to someone'?

I just got the Panasonic FZ50, and Jim (husband) has mentioned that I should shoot in RAW for most of the same reasons that you and Andy mentioned, but that statement of yours caught my attention. And, if I ask him, I know I will get a very technical answer that I won't quite get...

Will I have to do something to the RAW images beore I can print them out and put them in an album? Do they not look quite as good before you do something else to them? And if so, what is that something else?

I have lots of patience, but no time!

Lynda,
A RAW image cannot be viewed except with software that will interpret the file format used by your particular camera. But if you have the right software, you can view them just as you would a JPEG, and some software products might permit you to print them directly from RAW. I know mine does not, so what I end up having to do is pull up the RAW image and look at it, make any adjustments to brightness, white balance, saturation, sharpness, etc. and crop it as needed, and then save the changes. The pictures generally look fine without any of this adjustment, but pretty much any picture can be improved, so I at least &quot;tweak&quot; almost every one.

When I finish with a folder of pictures, I then select all the ones I want to print, or display on the interet, and the software batch-processes all of them at once and converts them into JPEGs. If you want a lossless format for printing or for further editing in another program, you can also convert them to TIFF format in the exact same way.

So, the short answer to your questions is that the pictures look fine in RAW format (just the same as a JPEG would have), but to get them into a format for printing (at least for me) requires the extra conversin step. But that conversion can be done on whole batches of pictures at once, so it is actually quite fast and easy.

If you are the kind of person who looks at each picture, tweaks it to make it look better, and then prints, then this extra step won't be a big deal for you. But the tone of the original poster's message did not suggest an interest in doing that kind of work with the images, so the RAW conversion would have been a wholly new step. Also, obviously it depends on how many pictures you take as well.

From my standpoint, I think that the greater flexibility of RAW means that I can process RAW images far more quickly than JPEG. Particularly when I have a picture with difficult lighting (i.e., dark shadows obscuring details, etc.), I find the ability to adjust curves much more flexible in RAW than JPEG. So I end up spending less processing time with RAW than I did with JPEG.

I hope I answered your question -- let me know if I can tell you anything more about the process. It is different with different software products, and the two products I use for RAW conversion are Digital Photo Professional (which came with my Canon camera) and CaptureONE LE, so your software may be very different, or you may choose to use Adobe's RAW conversion, or DxO or some other product.

Chris

I use raw most of the time ,but i think raw is not for everybody and not for every situation.

Here is a long, but very nice article (there are many) where you can see the advantages and disadvantages of shooting raw against jpeg.


http://www.ronbigelow.com/articles/raw/raw.htm

If you don´t have the patience to read the complete article ,just go to the end of part III and read the:

DO YOU NEED RAW ? conclusion, i hope you dont get more confused.

If you do get confused ,then read Ken Rockwell reasons and..... you will never use RAW.


http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/raw.htm


Paco.

paco - thanks for the references to two great articles on the subject. I like Ken's answer to &quot;Which should you shoot?&quot; - &quot;If you have to ask then just shoot JPG.&quot;
regards - tom

I'm afraid Ken Rockwell is not as much of an expert as he would like to think he is. Here's the real guide to who should use RAW...

If you get every single exposure spot-on in the camera then you should use jpeg. If you sometimes make a mistake with the exposure then you should seriously think about moving over to raw.

With the right software there's hardly any extra work to do with your images. The software can automatically process the raw images using the settings on the camera when the image was taken. It can then save all those images as jpegs. All automatically. So, with a small amount of extra work you've got exactly the same results as if you'd shot in jpeg.

Now you can look through your images. There's the one of the two cheetahs being chased off a kill by a male lion. Would have been fantastic if you hadn't forgotten to change the camera's exposure settings. If you've shot in jpeg then the amount of rescuing you can do is minimal. However, if you've shot in raw...

You camera acquires a lot more information than can be stored in a jpeg image. When you shoot jpeg then the camera decides what information should be thrown away and what should be kept. When you shoot raw you can let the camera decide - or, if the camera gets it wrong, you can decide. When you've got the exposure settings wrong the camera will throw away potentially useful data (because that's what you've told it to do). Shooting in jpeg means that data is gone forever. Shooting in raw means that you can make use of it to rescue an image.

So - jpeg is great for those people who get the setting right every time and/or are happy with the idea that their camera is cleverer than they are. Raw is for people who make mistakes sometimes and think they are sometimes more intelligent than their camera.

True, Ken Rockwell has a reputation of hyperbole.

You say, &quot;If you sometimes make a mistake with the exposure then you should seriously think about moving over to raw.&quot; Man oh man, I wish that exposure were the only thing keeping me from getting the photos I want !!!!

You make it sound as if RAW can save/fix anything. It can't, it just gives you a bit more latitude for exposure correction, like you said. Does it fix an exposure that is off by 3 f stops? Does it fix a photo that is out of focus? Does it fix a photo with blurred subject motion? Does it fix a photo that should have used a longer focal length lens? Does it fix a photo where the horizon is not flat? Does it fix a photo where the lions eyes are closed? Does it fix a photo where tree limb blocks the bird's legs and feet?

Most all (98%) of the photographers here are going to have these type of problems. Much bigger problems than can be corrected by RAW versus JPG output. Most of the photographers will not even crop a picture for better composition.

Nothing wrong with RAW, but it is for the photographer nerds, professionals, and hobbists. Like me (nerd), like you(?) :-) . I still think Rockwell got it right - if you have to ask, then don't use it.
regards - tom
ps - and yes, the camera is cleverer than most users.

Hey Guys,
I think by now you have really confused the original poster or scared them into charcoal and watercolors. When you create an image with your digital camera all of the information is captured in the same way weather in raw or jpeg, however, when you select jpeg, the cameras internal (on-board) software converts that data to a jpeg file. You determine the size of the file (i.e., the quality of the jpeg image). The remainder of the data is discarded. You can on most better digital cameras and on all SLR's select not only the quality of the jpeg but also the degree to which you want certain parameters altered (i.e., sharpness, color, and contrast). In my opinion raw gives the opportunity to save your mistakes and everyone makes those mistakes. For large crops and subtle lighting adjustments you can't beat raw. However, for somone new to digital it is an overwhelming addition, particularly when one has to fine tune the skill under safari conditions. This is a fantastic thread and I hope it will remain active, I have learned good stuff and enjoyed it.
Chuck

I'm the original poster, and I'm having a great time with this thread, and learning an incredible amount by just keeping my mouth shut!! Glad to find a thread that wakes people up. Now I have a question, my camera can be set to take a RAW and a JPEG fine image at the same time and hold both...why would or wouldn't I do that? Except for the obvious reason that it must take up an incredible amount of space.

The only reason I can think of to take both a RAW and large fine JPEG would be if you have some need to immediately view the JPEG (like on a portable storage device live an Epson P5000) or to send them JPEG via e-mail and you don't have your computer to do a conversion of the RAW file. So, imagine you are on safari and you don't have a laptop, but you do have a PSD. If your PSD won't display RAW files (which most of them will not), you can do a slideshow on the PSD or on a TV for your traveling companions using the JPEGs and still have the RAW files for later processing. Or you can hook your PSD to a computer in an internet cafe and e-mail a great picture home to your family.
Having said that, I think the penalty you pay in both storage space and in the time it takes to write both files to the card is absolutely not worth it, so I do not use my camera's RAW+JPEG mode. With a 10megapixel camera like a Nikon D80 or Rebel XTI, you would be writing 15-20MB to the card for every frame you take! Try doing a continuous-shooting burst and you would see just how fast the buffer would fill up and stop taking pictures, even if you are using a really fast memory card. So I would not recommend doing that.
Chris

What Chris suggests is true for many SLR's but for those thinking of upgrading to one of the professional Canon cameras (I'm biased) these Series &quot;1&quot; cameras will write to two cards (a compact flash and an SD card) within the same camera and will do so (at least the newest Canon Mark III) simultaneously. That means with one of these super SLR's you could wite JPEGS to one card and Raw to the other. Memory has become cheap and prices will continue to fall :-). Today you can buy a fast 8GB compact flash card for just a little over $100, a year ago it would have cost over $500. Heck, that's a day on safari.

Chuck, I would love to have a 1D Mark III, but spending $2600 for a body only will have to wait until I get some more lenses first! I saw a video on YouTube of a 1DIII in burst mode, and it sounded like a machine gun it was so fast! For now I have to be content with my 400D, with the possibility of a 30D as the next upgrade for the next safari we take. But for the moment I have made getting good-quality lenses a higher priority than a better camera body, as my feeling is that lenses make a big difference in image quality, and as long as I stick with the EF lenses, I can use them on any Canon body I may eventually get.
Chris

Great thread topic. Thanks for asking. I'm still in transition with a P&amp;S 8 Megpixel, and two Eos 3 film bodies. I've had scans made of my slides and melded them with the digital JPEGs for slide shows of my Alaska, India, and Africa trips. Can't tell the difference. I've only printed to 8x10, but they are as good to my eye as prints from my transparancies. As for the P&amp;S, I've had several published in magazine articles and the editors were quite happy (However, that was for a particular magazine, and others might have different, perhaps more stringent, requirements.

I've been doing some minor tweaking using Picasa, the free Google software (cropping, saturation,etc.) and it's been working out fine. And, leveling horizons is no problem at all even with JPEGs, although, sometimes, a tilted horizon can give the pic extra pizzaz (not landscapes, of course). and

I'm gonna get the new Mk III, and when I do, I'll go whole hog with RAW and Photoshop. I sure would like to know where you can get the body for $2600. Didn't think the price had been set yet, and Canon said in its original press release that it would be priced similarly to the Mk II, which is/was around $4k. in the US. With all of hoopla over the MkII, there's a lot of speculation that the price will be higher.

Jim

Jim

jenack, ok, let's go back to what you want to do, make prints. Probably a lot of 4x6 or 5x7 and a few 8x10 or maybe larger. If you want 11x14 or 12x18 Costco has very good printers and a 11x14 is only $3 (I think). Of course they will also print 4x6 or 5x7 for less cost than you can do it at home. For Costco 8x10 a JPG normal file is fine. In fact, I'm not sure what they would do with a RAW file, anybody know? Also nothing wrong with printing yourself, I enjoy it.

But you know, two years ago I quit making 5x7 prints of vacations. (I still make large prints to frame and hang). I mean, digital camera, digital pictures, DVD, TV. All falls into place. I make a slide show of the photos I like on DVD using the program ProShow Gold. Proshow Gold makes a DVD from still photos and video clips and you can make a real nice little travel show that plays on any TV. When our family/friends across the USA/world ask to see photos of our safari I send them the DVD. They then watch it at their leisure on their TV.

Anyway, go ahead and shoot both RAW and JPG, you might find a new hobby in &quot;post processing&quot; and working with RAW.
regards - tom

This has been an exceptionally good thread for me as I transition from my beloved Canon Elan 7N to a Canon EOS Rebel XTi (yet to be purchased, but reviewed and admired). As a newbie to the world of digital photography, I have found the information provided here of great value. Now all I need is for the camera to go on sale somewhere, although I do have until June/08 before my next safari.

Chris, I agree with the better glass being more important than the body. The focus on the 20D and 30D is a bit slower than I would like but it still gets the job done. The price that I was quoted for the new Mark III is $3999 but rumours are that it may be sold for $4500 or even more? Another advantage of the Mark 3 is its reported high iso performance. Hopefully I'll be able to keep shutter speed up enough on my 300mm 2.8 IS lens. I'll be shooting with a 1.4X teleconverter so I'm a bit worried that I'll have enough speed. In Botswansa the vehicles will not have a nice roof like the ones in Tanzania. They are open vehicles and I'm not quite certain how I will work out camera support. Maybe someone reading this thread will have some ideas. I'll be taking bean bags as well as a monopod.
Cheers, Chuck


Jim, before I switched to Canon, I went to the Galapagos with my Nikon film cameras. I had all of my slides scanned as you have done and was really pleased with the results. Now I'm all digital and love the freedom and the ability to shoot lots of images and select the best to photoshop.

Cary,
I too am using ProSho Gold to make slide shows. It's a fantastic program. I'm showing the iamges on a new high def TV and the resolution is fantastic. Instead of creating a cd or DVD you created an exec file of your slide show on a laptop and then plug that right into the high def TV. Thats what the Pro Sho Gold folks told me and it worked like a charm. Add some soundtracks (like roaring lions and sawing leopards) and you just about relive the safari experience.

Wow, thanks so much to all of you guys - I have been reading this thread over the past few days and LEARNING so much! I read Ken's article, and now between that, and this thread, I can actually understand what Jim (my husband) is saying to me!

He too has bought ProShow Gold, as he read Tom's thread on it once, and is loving it. He is about 1/2 through doing up a slide show set to African music, naration, etc. He put it on DVD for me to see the other night and it is fabulous! So easy to work with he says, and so much you can do with it.

I think I'll take those watercolours back to the store now! :-)

Oh, forgot to say, after all this reading and learning, here's what I concluded is best for me-

I think I will shoot in RAW and then if I don't feel like, or have time to do anything with them, I will batch process them with my software. But, if I do want to play with one or two (or get Jim to is more like it), then it can be done.

Sort of like bringing the raw olives homes from Greece and then making the olive oil here before they go bad....

Safarichuck

I found what looks like a good alternative set-up rather than a tripod or bean bag for long lens users. A Manfrotto 635 super clamp and Manfrotto 2934 3/8&quot; mounting plate with lock screw. You then attach your ball head to the mounting plate and wimberly to the ball head. I will send you a fax photo of the set up as I have it printed it from another site which is not available any more. The clamp goes on to the bars behind the seats. The cost of this set up (clamp and mounting plate is less than $60 and can be ordered from B&amp;H).
Just let me know where to fax it.
Regards,
Eric

I'll have to check out ProShow Gold. Sounds pretty cool. The pictures look pretty good on TV, right?

For African music you might consider the sound track from the Broadway musical, The Lion King. It has some of the same songs that are in the Disney movie but also many different ones. My favorite (and you should hear the kids singing it in the car) is #4 and I also like #2 and #12. You can listen to them here http://www.amazon.com/Lion-King-1997...377&amp;sr=8-1
scroll down to &quot;Listen to Samples&quot;. (The kids also LOVE to sing #11. So funny.)

BTW, I shoot RAW. I still only know very little about PS but do manage to post photos.

I have no idea why I thought the 1DIII was going to cost $2600 -- must be that I was remembering the price of a 5D or something like that. But frankly it doesn't matter whether is is $2500 or $4500, it is still out of reach for a DSLR beginner like me. For our next two trips, I plan to get 3-4 new lenses (70-200/2.8, EFS10-22, and a 300/2.8 with TCs, with maybe a 24-105L to boot) to complement the 100-400L that we use for wildlife. I will be lucky to get a used 30D or 20D as a second body with the money for all those lenses flying out of my account! But our experience with the 100-400 is that is gives us really nice results in good light, but it struggles when the lighting gets bad, hence the need for the 2.8 lenses.

Chris
P.S. I keep forgetting to include a link to our photo galleries -- so here it is: www.pbase.com/cwillis

Cindy,
The photos look very good on a TV, the better the TV, the better they look. However they are not HD, they are of the quality of a regular DVD scan , 480 lines is it? I would like to try it on a DVD player that simulates HD, will do that someday. I'm really waiting for ProShow Gold to have HD capability, and a HD DVD recorder and HD disks that are not too expensive. Probably in two years.
ProShow Gold is very easy to learn/use. Very versatile, add still photos, add music, add video clips, make simple special effects, zoom (Ken Burns, on photos, color correction. I like it a lot, just need HD capability. I'll be happy to send you our DVD of our 2006 safari and you can see for yourself. Email me at tdgraham at sbcglobal dott net. Put Fodors in subject line so I can find it in the spam. (If you don't hear back from me, the spam got it, try again). I'll send out a few more if anyone else is interested.
regards - tom

chuck, I have yet to do that,even though I have a PC permanently digitally connected into my Panasonic HD TV!!! (games) The exec file that ProShow Gold creates, it is still not HD is it? It is still an mpeg-1 file, of 480 lines, no? Does the PC/laptop run a &quot;mpg&quot; file? Unless it is showing the original photos as a jpg slide show? That is probably what it is doing? Can you refer me to Proshow documentation about this? Guess maybe I should just make a test show and try it !!!!

But the idea of the DVD is for sharing photos with family/friends. So they can simply take the DVD, drop it into their DVD player and watch it. Most of those folks don't even have a HD TV !!!
regards - tom
ps - if regular TV were broadcast properly, most people wouldn't care a lot about HD. Don't get me started !!!!

Hi Tom,
The Pro Show Gold tech helpline told suggested that I create the executable copy and save it to a CD. That CD will play on any windows PC and out a high definition show. Well it worked. I bought a Sony Bravia 40&quot; LCD TV and plug my laptop into it directly. I either use the disk I've created on the big desktop PC or put a copy on a thumbdrive (sandisk titanium 1GB) and then put that onto the laptop and plug it into the TV. We send the CD's we create to friends and have them play them on their computers, these high definitio executable shows will not run on a regular DVD recorder, however by outputting directly from a laptop you can play on any high definition TV. The steps can be found in Chapter 17 EXECUTABLE CREATION, page 291 of the ProSho Gold documentation. New versions probably are on another page. I am refering to Version 2.6 of the Users Guide. Let me know how it works for you. This setup really made up for the loss we felt when we gave up kodachrome slides. The images have incredible resolution and detail.

Eric,
Thanks for the suggestion. I think I have a copy of that setup. I got it from Fred Mirandas site and the post was by Suemacc. She shows the setup on a 500mm f4 on an open vehicle in Bots. I believe she is on the faculty at Stanford U. I have a Really Right Stuff B55 ballhead but so far I have not purchased the sidekick. My wife keeps remining me that we are going to be overweight if I buy another piece of camera gear. All of the pictures I have seen of the vehicles in the Botswana camps we are headed for (Savuti, Chitabe, Kwetsani) suggest that the bars are very very low. I don't know if clamping that low will allow me to get any sort of line of sight? I had hopped that by placing a monopod between my knees I might get enough support and still have some mobility. What do you think? I will take Safari Sacks along as well. I'm afraid that unless we have the vehicle entirely to ourselves, I will not be able to use the clamp setup you mention. I had thought I might be able to get away without the Wimberly setup using a 300mm 2.8 IS lens with a 1.4 teleconverter. I can handhold this for short periods (unlike the 500mm f4). I am practicing with it right now and have mixed success after about 5 miinutes. It just gets to heavy but the monopod seems to improve things a lot. Let me know what you think and weather you have ebver tried the clamp setup yourself. I could always cramn it into my jacket pocket and avoid the overweight problem.
Cheers, Chuck

Chuck, you are correct as far as the origin of the setup. Susan used that in Botswana and I think she stayed at Vumbura Plains, Kings Pool and some others. I am planning to use it myself this trip at Savuti, Chitabe and Little Vumbura but we do have a private vehicle so it may be easier. I suspect if you are in the second row left hand seat you would probably be ok since there will most likely be no one in front of you. I also have taken a tripod in the past and although we were 5 and all family members it worked pretty well. I took my 300 2.8 to E.Africa last summer and used bean bags out of the pop off top and through the windows with pretty good success. Hand holding is tough after a while and I got camera elbow. This year its a 500 and I don't even want to think of hand holding.On 1trip I took a monopod which was not to sturdy and found it useless but I think with a better quality one the results would have been different. What is your weight limit to Bots...I think mine is 20kg at least not the 12kg I had to Namibia. My camera equip alone is at least 15kg so very few no necessary items get packed.
As far as the wimberley, I got the sidekick and it works well but for a 300 I don't think its absolutely necessary. I have a Manfrotto 322RC on my tripod that works great with the 300. It's a pretty light set up especially with a carbon fiber tripod. Unfortunately, I was forced to get a different set up for the 500.
Let me know how things work out.
Regards,
Eric

Eric, would you mind emailing me that setup, as well? My email address is andybiggs_at_gmail_dot_com.

I also have an interesting setup that I will share with the group. Give me a few minutes to dig it up and post it to the web.

Thanks!

Andy

Here is a quick link to a pretty nifty monopod setup for use in open vehicles.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/94378656@N00/429304957/

The setup consists of three different monopods, some Bogen Super Clamps, and some other various equipment.

How very cool, Andy. I think I &quot;get&quot; most of it except how you attach the two monopods from the vehicle's cross bar to the top of the center monopod just below the camera. It looks like some custom fitting and drilling was required. Yes?

Jim