I think th e best advice you got as to spend so much time shooting that you have no time for ebay/amazon/etc... also going to tag sales,flea markets etc will keep u off the net..... enjoy your new stuff!!!
You wil probably get better results with a greater range from dark to very light. You want to have some detail left in the sky in the darkest one and some detail in the darkest part in the lightest shot... myself I shoot 5 pics using the built-in exposure control. I use Photomatix Pro. Sometimes I use it with a single photo to bring up the color a bit or whatever, to make the image closer to what I saw... Cropping and other chores are done in AVS Photo Editor.
HYUCK HYUCK.... did it take the ketchup too???
here's the shot mentioned in my previous post.
Look around for milkweed; it seems they (butterflies)like that too. I had to go to Old Chatham to get my b-fly shot, but it got me Photo of the day on CaptureMidHudsonValley.com
I have enjoyed my superzoom P100 "shooting the moon" and many other ways. I just aquired a Minolta Maxxum with a tele lens and will enjoy that too....but the Nikon is the everywhere camera.... and probably always will be.
which I see in your photo you are not using.... s'ok....i am guilty of the same thing sometimes, but not as often as before I had to pay to get my Nikon repaired....
I have a Nikon P100 with the super zoom lens and yes, the image suffers from considerable pixelation at full zoom- fun, but useless ...
I've been on both sides of this ...I nearly lost my Nikon to a strap that caught in something, and had it drop to the ground twice (with injuries) once when the tripod adaptor slipped and once when i just plain dropped it... strap around my neck would have saved it the second time.... It's a problem because I cant focus on the LCD screen at the distance the strap gives me..so have to trust auto focus...