Thanks so much guys for all your feedback!!!!!! Richard, you asked how i arrived at my exposure time. Well, I've been bugging Eric (eb) a lot!!! LOL! i begged him to tell me his secrets, and he gave me very detailed information on what settings he uses (a general guide--not set in stone). Then, once i had the basic idea, i just experimented like i always do. I tried going in the opposite direction with the exposure time, and the result turned out pretty crappy. ISO is critical. even at 200, there was too much noise. anyway, i played around with exposure time between 3-5 sec. Five seconds seemed to be perfect. what do you think? i decided to see what happened when i drastically changed the exposure time. the image was really dark. not bad, just not much detail and pretty dark too. it wasn't what i wanted.