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That looks like a pretty nice head for the tripod.
I looked at a number of other designs and was initially leaning toward the Acratech products. The RRS stuff comes highly recommended and looks/sounds so bullet-proof. My only disappointment is that it looks like their D300 L bracket won't have an additional threaded mount for when you want to use it temporarily with a tripod or other mounting device that doesn't have a clamp on it. I'm going to ask them about tapping it for me though.
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I have the [Nodal Ninja] 3, great bit of kit so the 5 can only be bigger and better, you won't regret that purchase!
I looked at so many solutions for a long time. I was initially leaning toward the RRS stuff but the prospect of paying their price was killing me ($800). Of course the RRS clamps and rails look every bit as god as everything else they make. I ended up stumbling upon the NN site and lucky me, they're about to come out with the NN5 which is pretty much a necessity for the bigger D300. Of course after this discovery I was looking through some old email and found a message from a good friend with links to all the good stuff I had just been finding on my own (including a number of links to pano software)
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Quite an amazing program, I was "trying out" Aperture, but Lightroom really blows it out of the water once you get the hang of it. I am not very good with photoshop myself so personally my aim is to get it as right as I can in the camera, I love Cokin filters but have yet to perfect the art of their use.
I've written about LR in other threads here. I had a number of reasons for choosing it over Aperture, despite Adobe repulsing me. Aperture is slower, regardless of what hardware you have. Aperture sucks up HUGE amounts of disk space even when you managing images in their original locations - its previews, even at most conservative settings were just eating way too many GB of HD space. Aperture also has some awkward and senseless concept of hierarchy for organization. They couldn't just use simple folders and let the user decide what they mean. No, they create multiple containers and saddle them with different restrictions and meanings that you can't alter. And you can't organize them as you would a plain folder hierarchy. Even if I had a super fast system and gobs of HD space to burn, there's no way I could put up with this fundamental design flaw. Aperture just sucks for DAM, IMO.
I'm looking/hoping for serious upgrades to LightRoom of course. I'd like more speed, more intelligent/human tools and the ability for third parties to plug into the non-destructive adjustment workflow. One of the things it really needs is region-based selection - and hopefully something implemented with some new ideas (see LightZone). I'd also love to see support for bigger image dimensions (it's limited to 10k x 10k which won't suit panos very well at all, not to mention any GigaPixel images 
) Having built-in support for HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging with tone-mapping would also be very welcome.
My primary criteria in looking for such a program was asset management. With Aperture and LightRoom released there was also no way I was going to settle on a solution that required firing up Photoshop or otherwise didn't support non-destructive editing. Unfortunately, the only other possibility I found was LightZone and it's not strong enough in management and a few other areas, despite its fantastic tools interfaces. LightRoom was therefore the only choice for me.
There are also a few things I hope they don't do, but more for selfish reasons because they might conflict with some software designs I'm working on. 
I haven't had time to make any shots worth posting with the D300 yet. Just finishing up customer support emails and shipping for the day and still have to tackle an initial proposal which I promised someone for this weekend. In truth, I probably could have waited a couple of weeks for the camera because I'm so bloody busy. But on the off chance I get a few minutes here and there at least it gives me the opportunity to gain some proficiency with its settings, giving me a better likelihood of making some pictures over the holidays.
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