Not photography related. I kissed a lot of frogs dating. (kissing only) But I found the right girl. 55 years later we are still happily married. Sometimes at first, if you don't succeed keep trying. Edison found over 1000 solutions to light bulbs that didn't work, but his final solution for the light bulb went on to make him famous.

I have a Nikon D5300 camera and use an 18-300mm lens. Usually, for action shows like sports, I put the camera in continuous focus and continuous shutter at 5 fps. I use a fast memory card otherwise it will buffer and get bogged down for a lot of action shots. Horse shows aren't as fast action as hockey or football. Still, each jump could back up the camera's memory input.

The important thing is to have fully charged batteries with backups. Continuous focus and shutter wear them down quickly, especially after several hundred pictures. Indoor shows like these require higher ISO settings. That could slow things down a bit. Your horse shows are usually outdoors I assume.

Since you seem to be using a Mac computer, iMovie has all to tools you need for making slide shows and movies. Watch several YouTube videos to learn how to use it. I have scanned many pictures of my daughter and family on vacations and copied instrumental music from my library's Music (formally iTunes) icon. You can fade up and down at each end of scenes and put titles of places and dates in blocks in various colors. Use different chapters for each travel location, so they can be watched separately if wanted without watching the entire video. The entire video can be put on a flash drive or burned to a DVD. Warning: DVDs only hold about 4.7 GB of data. 1080mp images take up a lot of space.

Good for you. Several years ago my favorite aunt passed and left me some money--not too much--a few thousand. I didn't know what to do with it. My wife suggested getting something I have always wanted but didn't have the money. Since photography is my life, I got a 105mm macro lens and ring flash. I have always enjoyed macro pictures. Since then, I have taken hundreds of macro pictures of flowers, insects, common everyday items, etc. There was a contest in the "Games" magazine on submitting pictures of common objects taken from unusual perspectives making them difficult to identify. I won first prize: $500 in cash and my photograph in their magazine. I had submitted about 25 pictures to them for the contest and won 4 other places of the top ten prizes. They also pictured those photos in the magazine but didn't send me a tee shirt like the other winners got. They said the first-prize award was sufficient.

What was the winning picture? A picture of the corner of a stop sign shows only the colors red, white, and blue sky without revealing the wording. You had to identify the object from the corner shape and the colors. A couple of the other winners were broccoli and an old 78 RPM record's grooves,

Again congratulations on the inheritance and enjoy your new passion.

I have a remote control from 1986 when I bought my B & O Biosystem 9000 new. I checked after reading your posting and the battery still works. Maybe I'd better replace it now before it fails. I didn't use the remote because I could reach the controls from my chair.

My local library has a scanner for slides and negatives. 35 MM, 120, and 620 slides and/or their negatives. One one-hour class is needed to learn all the techniques. Take detailed notes. I can schedule scanning time from their website which fits my schedule. They have a Canon scanner with 3200 DPI. It does a fantastic job but only 4 slides at a time. It takes about 90 seconds per group of 4 slides, not counting the loading and unloading of the scanner. While scanning the slides, I used the dust brush and blower as mentioned in the previous reply. I export them to a flash drive which I import to my computer. I edit the images for under/over exposure on the computer and crop them to my desired size. Check out your local library or get a card from a larger city's library with a scanner. Sure it is time-consuming, but the end results are worth the time.

Back in 1965 1 week before finals and High School graduation, I caught German measles. I had gone through 4 years of high school without a single day's absence. I even went on snowstorms. Because I left before the radio announced school cancellations, the janitor turned me away several times. I was determined to get a perfect attendance award, so I hid in the back of the classes. Just before lunch, my English teacher spotted (excuse the pun) my face and sent me to the nurse's office. She sent me home for a week and a doctor's note to return in time for finals. I missed out on the award, but with an entire week to study for finals, I aced every final test.

My parents never took any pictures of me after the age of 1. But my dad had a thousand pictures of the action on the battlefields of Europe in WW II. I bought my first camera at age 6 with two Kix box tops and 50¢. It took an entire month of saving my allowance to save that money. The film was another chore. Fifty cents per roll of black and white and a dollar to develop and print the 12 pictures. I did chores around the house, neighborhood, and everywhere I could find work. Snow shoveling was the most profitable. I photographed my friends, relatives, everywhere we went and everything we did. When I had my daughter, I resolved to document her entire life so she would have those memories to relive and review. She is 34 now and she still shows every guy she dates all the childhood memories she had. Occasionally I spend a few hours reviewing the hundreds of albums I've created of my life and my daughters. We have our lives documented to bring back the many memories we've had. My parents didn't want to remember me when they got old, but I have made sure my daughter has plenty of memories to look back on. The walls of our house have so many instances of our life there are no more places for grandchildren when they arrive. My retired film darkroom in the basement has been turned into a film library of history. When we get old, what else is there to remember, but the good times?

This is my first posting. The sun was supposed to rise at 5:07 am, but it was cloudy. I stood around until 6:00 when the clouds broke. I have never photographed an eclipse before. Please enter suggestions and comments. I used a 300 MM lens at f9.5, 1/350 s, ISO 2000, -1Ev. I didn't know what to use, so I just kept making adjustments. My camera is a Nikon D5300, 18-300 MM lens. I cropped it slightly for this posting.

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