On the 18th November 2007 Marwell Zoo in Hampshire celebrated a rare birth, that or a female Amur Leopard cub. With less than 35 of these beautiful animals left in the wild this was clearly big news. It was perhaps even bigger news when on 29th February 2008 the zoo announced that the cub would be put into the Leopards area and be visible to visitors for the first time. Seeing this on the news we decided to take a trip to the zoo the next day.

I've been to Marwell several times before but it's always nice to revisit it and to try to get some more photos of the animals. How did I get on?

I've been a big fan of Shimano reels since I first bought an Aero GT 6010 about 15 years ago. There just seems to be something about their gears, clutch and bearings that just make them so reliable and smooth to use. Unfortunately after 10 years in my loft my old 6010 hasn't faired too well. It's nothing that can't be repaired and I will be sending it off for servicing but at the moment the bearings screech a little when under pressure and the reel just feels clunky which is evident in the line lay which isn't quite right and I'm getting more than the average number of tangles.

Therefore I wanted to treat myself to a new reel and I knew that it had to be a Shimano and that it had to be a baitrunner. The question was, which one. I haven't bought a new reel in over 15 years so I had no idea what current models were, what 'new' features were available and how much I would have to pay in order to get a decent reel.

Back in March 2007 I wrote this article where I compared the RAW processing of Photoshop, Lightroom 1.0, Aperture 1.5 and Capture One 3.7. The results of that test was that Aperture produced the best results but that overall Capture One was the best RAW editor. The disadvantage of Capture One of course is the fact that it has no file management capabilities which led to the conclusion that, if you had a Mac, Aperture was the best choice if you needed file management as well as RAW processing. As I concluded in my original article, the problem was that if you had a PC there was no one clear winner, if you only wanted RAW processing than Capture One was a clear winner but if you also needed file management you would have to buy Lightroom but would you want to 'suffer' it's RAW engine?

Since that original article was written Adobe and now Apple have released new versions of Lightroom and Aperture respectively. At the time of writing Lightroom is at version 1.3 and Aperture has just been released as version 2.0. So how do they compare now?