One of my favorite places. Spring of 2016 when I was last there--great for wildflowers--Stovepipe Wells service was horrible and indifferent at best. Better food and service at Furnace Creek. Cabins were better too. Different owner/contractors makes a difference. Apparently, however, things have changed. Hoping that it will get better. Maybe in time for this spring's wildflowers.

Aside from that, the dead of winter is also a great time to visit DV. The skies are spectacular and you don't have all the city light pollution.

Not for long Jerry. At this rate, the cockroaches will take over in only a few years. Well, I console myself. I'm 81. I'll be leaving the problem to my children. I get to pour CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. (And yes, the ocean plastic does come more from SE Asia, but we contribute more than we should.) then they get to clean it up.

YES!!!!! That's what I mean by a real camera. Congratulations. Now you are approaching "Full Frame" sensor. LOL None of this namby=pamby 35mm.

First, that is incorrect. I know many pros who use aps-c sensor cameras, get excellent results and make a good living. The images are just as good unless you want to crop to a fingernail and then print 30x40. The only serious part of the above answer is that without very good lenses, no camera will do the job.

The only "real" camera is an 8x10 view camera. LOL

You hit the one issue with Sony aps-c cameras. Tamron, Sigma, Tokina have all somehow missed the E-mount. Until that changes, I will continue using my old and tired Nikon 400 with a dumb adapter. It works, but why? I do have an A-mount and an la-ea3 adapter for my Minolta macro lens. Works fine, but I would jump at a long lens if they let me have one.

I've been hunting for a light-weight bag with rollers to carry my stuff. I often fly to places and have tried several options. The camera bags with rollers are all too big and bulky for a Sony rig. The roller backpacks are cheap, but they don't zip all the way down. I always take along a shoulder bag for carrying just the camera and a second lens (And batteries, filter, etc.) But what I want is a bag I can roll down the airplane aisle and put up in the bin. But when the agent asks for my ticket I can find it in an outer pocket along with my passport, etc.

But at 81 and bad knees, weight is an important factor.

Rich, I feel your pain. 35 cents is very reasonable if you can feed that production line all day. But (And I'm a big fan of 120 film formats) if it is a custom process the cost of production get very high, very quickly. I've used ScanCafe on two occasions. My friend had several scrapbooks from the 1920s--1940s. They were from Japan and showed her family as it lived through the war and before. They did a great job of restoring old creases and hypo-bleached prints of varying sizes, but they were going to a standard 35mm digital size. (Even with the restorations, I think they only charged about 45 cents average.)

Running a business includes a lot of costs that as individuals we don't have to consider. You almost surely can do it cheaper yourself; especially if you don't have to factor in your own time, insurance--in case of a fire in the building, health insurance for your employees, rent on the property, etc. etc.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Put your programs and OS on the SSD. Modern apps are constantly switching pieces of code in and out. It makes a big difference.

I bought a D3400 for my daughter. I was surprised at how light it was. Almost as light as my Sony a6300.

I just purchased an "ultimate" computer (ultimate until next month. LOL)

First. Buy a Windows machine. For any level of capability, a similar Mac will cost 3 times the price, and have a much reduced upgrade path. Often also the video graphics system will be lesser. Macs are great toy computers. My 5 year old grand daughter enjoys hers to play games.

Get the latest I7 Intel cpu that you can. As a minimum, get the latest I5.
Get >16gb of RAM.
Get a video card with at least 2 but better >=4 Gb
Try to get your system drive (C:) as a solid state drive (SSD). This alone will speed up your work by a factor of 2-3. Keep all your data on a hard drive (Often D:) and only the OS and some of the program and cache on the SSD. (Google the reasons for SSD and you will understand.)
Most modern monitors are getting really good. LG is okay. Samsung is better.
Do not buy HP. In the old days HP was great, but their customer service has deteriorated.

After a deep survey of the market, my preferences are Dell, Acer and Asus. I just bought a new Dell 8920 with I7-7700, 32 GB Ram, 250 ssd, 1 TB hard drive, 8GB Radeon video card. and a lot of other specs. All for <$1,000. I bought directly from Dell, but Costco has the same machine for the same price and I would have had their Costco service which is excellent. (Though Dell's own customer service is great too.) What I prefer about Costco is that their return policy is very lenient, whereas Dell may charge a small restocking fee. But not much different.

While this level of machine is often touted as almost a hi-power "game" machine for those who compete across the internet, those are largely the same best specifications useful for post processing photography. (A real game machine might even be watercooled. LOL)

The very first test I ran on it was to load Affinity Photo and do some complicated selecting. It was instantaneously responsive. I then used my favorite Affinity tool, the In-painting brush, to get rid of a myriad of telephone and electric wires that were spoiling the facade of a Mexican church. Following that I touched up a teen-age acne face with that tool.

I have never had a computer that handled this fast, and I've had several. I used Adobe PS for over 20 years on both Mac and Windows.

I have zero experience with Luminar. I dislike the Evil Empire, aka, Adobe as much as anyone. About a year ago I began using Affinity Photo. First out for Mac, it was written so that creating a Windows version was not too difficult and the versions, apparently, are essentially identical. The quality of the programming is very high. There are a few nits I can pick, but overall I find it superior to Photoshop--especially certain tools. One of those nits is that I got used to working in inches and Affinity much prefers measuring in pixels.

I especially like Affinity's insistence on the discipline of doing everything with layers. This makes it much easier to keep a constructive approach and readjust every adjustment. The inpainting brush does pure magic to get rid of interfering power lines and telephone poles, etc.

My three Windows 10 computers are permanently connected to the Internet. Yes there are constant attempts by "bad guys" but there are protections and they have never succeeded in getting through the defenses. As to the updates, I keep hearing about the unreliable updates, but I have not experienced any problems. Besides, you can set up the system to reject any updates. (I'd never do that as it is part of the value of Windows 10. ) No, I don't own Microsoft stock, but have found Windows, especially since Win 7, quite reliable.

Linux has the potential to be an excellent option. You can set your system to run both Windows and Linux and many do that; mostly running Linux but when wanting to use software only available for Windows, that becomes possible. Linux simply lost the commercial battle. No one could make sufficient money supporting it. Of course, I haven't kept up with the latest Linux news in 15 years. Maybe there are some amazing new software products.

I also grow oyster mushrooms. They love growing in coffee grounds. (They are delicious, cooked so many ways.) I've not tried growing other kinds of mushrooms, but I've never found any I didn't like. (Lots of Youtubes of retired seniors making a nice side income selling mushrooms to small stores.) Shitakes would even be better but they like to grow in holes in small logs. No coffee grounds, thank you.

Excellent suggestions.

Pretty good. She looks comfortable. No major problems with the lighting except that the light on her right is way too powerful and really doesn't add anything. I would move it up. Turn it down and fashion a snoot to make it a hair light. That would bring more life to the image.

I don't use the NIK filters. I learned about shooting older women from a pro. He usually made a duplicate layer, turned the transparency way down to about 45% added some gaussian noise to it and then masked out the eyes, nose, mouth, hair, jewelry. That kept the feeling of sharpness, but also softened all the skin. I still do that. It only takes two minutes and works better than any of the addins I've tried.

Your wife is a gorgeous woman who has lost little of her evident vivaciousness with the years. Give her a kiss for me.