I did a picture a day (PAD) every day for 3 years. It's a great way to improve your photography, the discipline of having to find something to shoot each day helps you learn how to see things differently. And you don't need fancy equipment to do it either. Most of my PAD was taken with my "hand...

http://prophotoshow.net/seim_effects/

You can download some free sample sets to try out.
His Power worklow set is great too.

I have Elements 11 but do my mono conversion in LR. The LR conversion tool is excellent but recently I've been using Gavin Seim's Silver Shadows 2 pre-sets, which I can highly recommend.

I remember this well - I designed a T-shirt based on this poster which I sold to a few photographer friends

I used to use an Epson Drive and loved it, but when I bought my 5D the Epson didn't support it. The cost of the latest model was prohibitive so I went for a netbook instead. Am now thinking of replacing that as the netbook I have is a bit heavy TBH. Especially when I'm carrying it around with the re...

No the camera isn't reading the card either. :( Nina you're right, although it's disappointing to have lost some good shots taken at our club session, at least I didn't lose all of them - and I would have been really upset if it had happened on holiday. Mike, I've just bought a new 8GB card but my o...

I bought I new SanDisk card which came with a year's free subscription to RescuePro Deluxe. However, I'm not going to be able to recover my images from the corrupt disk. RescePro is only able to recover files if the media is readable by the computer - and that's not the case. Oh well. At least I got...

LOL... I had a run in with a station attendant at Charing Cross a couple of years ago. He told me I was contravening the Terrorist Act and he demanded I hand over my camera so he could delete my images... I explained quietly that he was wrong and had no right to do what he was threatening to do - he...

I'm all too familiar with the last one you mention Mike, after years of taking street shots in and around Westminster !
Railway stations are the worst though.

I like the B&W version better, it gives a documentary feel.

I love taking street candids but just wish I were invisible ! I don't like poking my lens too obviously at people and have often gone through all sorts of pantomime pretending I'm not taking a photo of someone !