Chuck is totally right about this. The IS systems, at least on the Canon lenses I use, are very effective at letting you handhold at slow shutter speeds. For example, we have gotten sharp pictures with our 70-200/2.8 at 200mm with shutter speeds of 1/15 and 1/30 at 200mm. This is, of course, with non-moving subjects. As Chuck said, IS cannot do anything to freeze subject movement, so if you are trying to capture a moving subject, you must shoot at a sufficiently fast shutter speed to avoid a blurred image. When you get in low light, that means having a fast lens and increasing the ISO on the camera.

So, while IS is very useful and increases the versatility of a lens, it does not solve all low-light problems, and since wildlife subjects frequently move, IS is of only limited utility in allowing for wildlife pictures in low light, especially birds, which never sit still!

Chris

Now what do you say about bringing a laptop to download all the photos to? My laptop has about 60 gigs (I'm a novice too) but I have an external device of 120 gigs) which I hope is enough for my daughter and I to use to store all our photos. But then I thought.. should I bring DVD's too (or instead of) the external drive?
We're limited to weight, and I have a NIKON D 200 camera, a NIKON 80-400mm lens, plus a NIKON 35-70 (something like that).. plus of course the polarizing filters and all the battery chargers etc. I'm wondering how I'm going to carry all this on the planes to Tanzania along with the shampoo, conditioner, contact lens solutions and everything that shouldn't go in the checked soft sided duffels I read are recommended rather than hard sided wheeled luggage since total weight can only be 33 # including carry on, per person?
This is a great thread, and I'm going to print it out to take with me - we leave early June for Tanzania!

Taking a laptop is too much stuff to deal with, so we use portable storage devices. The ones I use are called Hyperdrives, and we travel with two of them. They are compact, fast and reliable. Much less weight and bulk than carrying a laptop. On our last trip, we took one 100GB one and one 120GB one -- for the next trip we will probably take two 250GB ones, so we can back up everything twice and since we are taking two camera bodies.
The amount of space you need is determined by whether you shoot RAW or JPEG and how trigger-happy you are. So it varies a lot between different people.

Chris

teadrinker, I agree with Chris entirely. A laptop is just too much to deal with and unless you intend to edit and photoshop your pics while on safari, not the way I would go. Instead take a (PSD)portable storage device (or 2). You might even consider buying enough flash memory so that you can get away without downloading anything but save all your original flash cards much the same way we used to save unprocessed film. If you do decide on a PSD the Hyperdrive are one of the best and most popular, Epson makes another (p3000 & p5000. For a good recent review of the Hyperdrive, take a look at http://luminous-landscape.com/review...erdrive/.shtml. That should give you some idea of one of the best and most complete units available. The Epson PSDs are slightly larger and have much smaller capacities (40 or 80 GB) but are very popular and have very nice displays. Some people like to use the Epson units to view movies etc. If you really get into photography you will want a small laptop eventually. I will be adding a newer laptop just as soon as the newest versions with high capacity (over 120 GB) flash memory, instead of a conventional hard drive, become available. Once I though laptops were the only way to go but now with all of the camera gear (large telephoto lenses, backup bodies etc.) I now take about 120GB of flash cards plus a personal storage device. I back everything up once and leave the original flash card intact until I return home and download to my computer. So you see there are several ways to skin this cat (oops, sorry Hari, you know what I mean ;-) )

I must have hit the post instead of review button? I hope the post reads correctly, at least my suggestions are pretty clear, sorry for typos.
Chuck

Seeking some help.
I was going back to some of my old raw photos and thought I would try them in DPP instead of Camera Raw and PSE (and CS3). Just cause it was 3:am and I had nothing better to do . Most of our photos are in IPhoto and I do not have a problem taking the raw files to the Adobe software programs from iphoto, but when I move them to DPP they revert to jpegs?
Any advice?

Thanks,
Keri

Hi Keri,
I think I understand your problem. Open DPP and click on tools. From the drop down menu click on preferences. Make certain that you check show only CR2 (raw files) and then the Raw files only should display. Otherwise it will display your JPEG file. Let me know if this helps.
Cheers-Chuck

Hi Chuck,
Are you using a Mac or PC?
I am on a Mac, trying to pull the cr2 files from iphoto to DPP. Having trouble.
Keri

Hi Keri,
Sorry I'm on a PC but I haven't heard of any difficulties bringing raw into DPP with either. Check to see if you have the "show only raw files" checked in the drop down menu under Tools/Preferences. If it is and you still have troubel it may be that you have an earlier version of DPP. You can get the latest DPP Version 3.4.1 right from the Canon sight. I beleive it came out on 5/20/08, so it may have fixed whatever bug you might be running up against. It a really nice program so I hope you can get it to work on your system. Good luck
Regards-Chuck

Thanks Chuck.
I will double check the version and update if need be.
Do you also use Adobe Camera Raw? I am downloading a tutorial for it now. I have enjoyed experimenting with it and figure I should take a "lesson". It is in PSElements6 and CS3.

When we went to Tanzania we shot very little raw files but bracketed every shot to be sure of a perfect exposure - then when we got home we only had to select photos not spend too much time in photoshop. We had over 10,000 images for our three week safari and while it took a couple weeks to get them down to a more managable 1000 we did very little 'work' to them. Your camera may have an auto-bracket feature so you will not have to think too much.
To see our images you can go to www.africanwildlifeandculturesafaris.com
I am working on my blog from our trip March 2007 and will post it when I get it finished.
have fun!

Keri,
I have used Adobe Camera Raw and Raw shooters essentials and they both were O.K.. I was on the lookout for a new RAW processor when Canon came out with DPP and like a lot of otehrs I was impressed. In particular, I like how it treats the colors. It really takes advantage of the additional information provided by having 14-bit RAW files. I did a little experiment and compared JPEGs prepared with Camera Raw and DPP. The DPP won hands down. I don;t know if it is better for everything but at least for my stuff is was much better. For example, I never previously was able to capture all of the shades seen in the Big Cats before. Now it seems that with DPP all of the subtle inbetween brown, red, and yellow colors come out. I batch process in DPP and export as 16-bit tif to a speperate folder. I open that folder with Photoshop and make my last adjustments (croping * sharpening) and then save as a 16-bit tif. I then Export the tif as a JPEG to another folder. I use the JPEGs for presentation and showing to friends. I erase my tif files since I can always go back to my RAW and redo if I making prints. That's my workflow, it's not really a big deal. You may have another scheme that fits your style but I would give DPP a try. It has won over lots of photographers. Heck, it is rare that a freebe of such quality comes along.
Regards-Chuck

Silverparrot, I just saw your post, are you and agent?? Yes bracketing JPGEs is another way to go but it never worked for me. First, no matter how I tried my exposures were never just right and often I missed the instant I was after (for example, the catchlight or expression). Keep in mind that JPEG files are lossy and processing them in camera still provides files that have already lost some information. Not important unless you intend to make very large prints (which I sometimes do).
Regards-Chuck

Hi Chuck,
I'm with you that Raw files are the best files - we do take Raw files - but for a novice it was just a suggestion. Although my back up camera (which I keep my wide angle lens on)can take as long to record a raw file as it does three jpegs. If I am trying to catch a bird in flight, or the gazelles on the move I get more shots off bracketing than I do shooting raw. I think it is time for some new equipment!
I am not an agent - we are helping a friend in Africa establish a tour company. We and act as his Canadian Liason - no money for us but our friend is generous to the charities on the site and that is fine with us.

Hi silverparrot, The reason I asked was that I thought the website you referenced was really very good. Some really very nice images. I can see why you are happy with the result. I sometimes make really large prints and so I hate to give up anything to lossy compression. For some reason, RAW processing scares people. Too bad they didn't stick a more friendly name on the sort of file it represents.
Regards-Chuck

Help please:
We just returned from Israel trip and for the first time I took all of the pictures in raw. I have now downloaded them to a seperate hard drive and now I do not know what to do.

How do I get them into a program that I can work in like Photoshop Elements? I will probably only do some basic editing for color etc and cropping.

I have a Pentax K100D camera.

Thanks

If you have PS Elements, you can open them directly. It will actually bring up Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and let you make some adjustments there, including exposure, white balance, and saturation. Then, if you click "Open Image" it will open it in PSE itself for additional editing (e.g., cropping).

Paul

spiegelcjs,
Paul is correct but I think you are asking a more basic how to question. Forgive me if I'm wrong but I think the following might help. Open Photoshop (elements 5 or 6) organizer, go to File/Get Photos and Videos/from files and folders and then select the hard drive and the specific folder that contains your raw images. Select all of the images you want to bring into the organizer and after editing them in photoshop, save as JPEGs. This should do it.
Cheers-Chuck

Chuck
Thanks for you help.

Keri

SafariChuck:
You are correct I need the real basics. The first thing Ineed to do is upgrade to either Photoshop 5 or 6. I think I only have 3. Once I do that I hope I will be ok. Most of the advice on the board is to shoot in RAW so that is what I did.

I do have a second question. Without the use of a laptop, is there anyway to project the images onto the TV screen so both my husband and I could look at the pictures together and decide what to delete. Once this is done then I can do the computer editing and transfer to a DVD.