Excellent, thankyou very much gents and the photos look fantastic. I'm just sorting my gear out now and still deciding what to take. I also have a canon g9 which I was going to take anyway - maybe I will just end up using that after lugging my gear over there!! One other question, when you took those pictures, did you set the white balance manually ie cloudy for overcast days and sunny for clear skies or did you use a custom white balance using the snow to set it ? I presume after that you adjust the exposure compensation using the histogram. I always use raw for my phtographs.