I've had a lot of different brands of tripods, some highly recommended and expensive and traveled with them a lot. Some basic suggestions that I can offer from experience. For travel on trains, planes etc. .... measure your bag, backpack, whatever your main travel container is and buy a tripod that will fit in it. Checking it separately just gives you extra worries. Go with a good ball head for your pod. Easy to use, more versatile and pack better without handles jutting out in all directions. One last suggestion would be lever lock legs as opposed to threaded. Threads are hard to clean (sand, dirt, grit ) and can cause problems. Spent a week camping and photographing on the beach and took great pains to avoid such a problem and it happened anyway.
In addition, for that same trip to the islands I made a pvc tripod case with carrying strap to protect it from the sand and salt water. Got the idea from plumbers and surveyors who carry a lot of stuff on the roof racks. They even make quick release, waterproof end caps for pvc piping. It worked so well I took it to Europe with me and checked it with my bags.
This was the early model I made with screw in end cap. Long story short, customs didn't like it, I couldn't speak French, he couldn't speak English .....! Just stick it your bags if you can and avoid the hassle.

I'll agree with you on the outrageous expense of a college education today. I went on a teaching assistantship so they paid me and all tuition was taken care of as well.The benefits of my photo education came from the people I met along the way. One of my professors was Beaumont Newhall, the guy that wrote the book on the history of photography. At the time I had no idea who he was. First day of class he pulls out an Ansel Adams portfolio, then a Paul Strand folio, a Minor White folio and he had more stashed away elsewhere. Photo is easy, what makes it exciting are the photographers, people who have devoted their lives to exploring the medium and evolving their vision. Photography is available to everyone (even more so today with the iPhone etc.) and it's much more than cute pictures of little kids and cats and dogs. Contrary to popular belief new cameras don't make your pictures any better or worse, they just make them more expensive. If you spent as much time developing a vision as you do figuring out which program to use, which button to push, which lens, what focal length etc.,etc., you would be way ahead of the game. Feedback from others, particularly other photographers and picture makers is a big part of the learning process and the reason schools and classes exist. Sure, you can do it in a vacuum but then all you've got is your own opinion. How biased could that be?
Personally I never enjoyed a career as a "professional photographer" although I did give it a go for several years. Guess I'm spoiled but I always considered photography a pleasure and doing it commercially turned that pleasure into a chore.
Going on fifty years as a photographer and I'm back to square one shooting with a view camera on 5x7 film. How's that for progress! Just wish someone made an autofocus view camera.

Good idea! I did it by accident. While in school at the University of Florida I stumbled into a show of Jerry Uelsman's photography ( sp?). At that point in my life my only camera had been a brownie star flash and I had no interest in photo at all. This guys pix literally changed my life. Sounds silly to say I'm a student of photography but that's what happened.
You can get a BFA and an MFA in photography, I got em, sounds silly, senseless, useless. I would like to warn you that if you decide to study photography your life will change. If for better or worse is up to you but once you start to explore the medium you will learn that it's a universal language that is totally open ended. You can take it wherever you want to go with it. It's not about cameras, it's about pictures., study photographers and their vision. It's a pleasure to explore the vision of others, not just Ansel Adams but photographers like Arbus, Winogrand, Friedlander, Gibson, Paul Strand,
D. Lange. I could go on and on but the beauty of photography is about how people see. UHH is about cameras and equipment. I wish that it could be a bit more educational,about vision and seeing. That's the essence of photo and digital takes it miles away from just pictures. Do the basics, learn to see, cameras are a prosthetic to vision, not a way to better photography.

Size em and make jpegs and email em. Check the size of the attachment (there's going to be a limit) your email allows! This bypasses compatability and hardware issues and the extra expense involved in sending the proper gizmo for their particular phone or tablet. If you need to send more than one attachment then do so. If you keep the photos in size and subject related files you can send and receive from whatever machine you have to whatever they've got and they can send to friends, relatives etc. with no hassles. It's the old KISS formula for efficient communication which doesn't show up much on UHH.

Make better pictures. Then you wil make better prints..... etc ,etc and so on. This exercise of taking pictures should be to improve your vision as a photographer not to waste paper and ink....unless you have a bottomless bank account. Don't mean to be rude but you need to figure out why you do what you do, preferably before you do it.

Exactly. I've got a kinda old school attitude about shooting pix. I always use a tripod and incident meter. Always felt the incident helped to nail the average exposure and the bracketing covered tonal range. That's a nice feature on the digital and the histogram gives a graphic of your exposure so you can feel fairly confident that you've nailed it. Kind of an abbreviated zone system approach without having to think about zones and development. You've got all the info and just use it as you will PP. Even snap shooting hand held the bracketing feature is an advantage. May not be able to layer them but still covers the bases exposure wise.

Use a handheld incident meter for your exposure .... Check the histogram and adjust accordingly. Make 3 ... Over and under and you've got all possibilities covered. This could be the big benefit in digital cause your not wasting film just space on your gizmo. Histo left 2 right, histo right 2 left, histo middle 1 over, 1 under, forget about it! Got it covered with an HD to fiddle with.

The discussion at hand merely points out how technology has changed people's perceptions and how they approach a task like picture making. BK (before Kodak) making realistic imagery was for specialists i.e. painters, printmakers, artists to use a broader term. Before photography, newspapers and magazines relied on sketches/ drawings/ cartoons for illustrations. Early photographers were specialists as well and their dedication to the craft brought many to an early grave (see daguerreotype). Even after Kodak most professional photography was still quite involved in the "process" of making pictures. Stuff like loading film, exposing and developing film, printing the final images for presentation, all of which was fairly expensive and time consuming. If you wanted B&W you bought the film, loaded it in the film holders or camera, exposed, developed and printed. Color generally the same but until the seventies you would generally send your film to a lab for p&p. There has to be a sense of purpose that often fails to materialize in digital because the "process" has become so abbreviated. In fact photography has morphed from a process in and of itself to an adjunct of computer technology. Decisions are made by setting controls and pushing buttons as before but proofing on paper is almost a luxury rather than a necessity. Deliberation and purpose seem to be set on "default" while we spend our time
figuring out which program, mode, camera, lens, format......etc.,etc., ad nauseum. After all those decisions we still have to figure out what to photograph and that's kinda like putting the cart before the horse. When you can fix stuff with another app or setting or by pushing a button after the fact then mistakes and the time and expense of your education as a photographer become almost inconsequential and effortless.
Remember..... "You gotta suffer if you want to sing the blues".

Arbus ..... You should name your retriever Arbus. Easy to say and won't be confused with commands like fetch or gimme or the other stuff I thought of as names for a retriever. If your not familiar with Diane Arbus as a photographer then google her! She might well represent what your new pooch see's when she looks up at you ( us) and all our human buddies. A very interesting picture maker of the human landscape variety. Check her out. I think she used a TLR and assume it was a Rolleflex. Had no idea about digital photo as that came later. Just trying to throw in some photo info about interesting and unique pictures rather than how to waste your bucks on camera equipment you can't understand.

Stick with what you've got and get intimate with it. Digital is a blessing and a curse, too much crap and too many choices just to take a photo. AP, SP, AUTO, PROGRAM, yada,yada yada. I think you should keep the camera and invest in a new lens (get a prime in the focal length you shoot in most). That will remove decision #1 and save some money. Put the rest of what you would have spent on a new camera into a good printer, one designed for photos and a size larger than your 3in1 (I assume). Printing costs may go up a little bit but you'll get a different experience print wise. If you
don't think your PP soft ware suits you then try another. If you still think you need a new camera step up then try one of the newer 16mp rangefinder style cameras that allow you to use the lenses you already have. Keep it light and inexpensive and easy to use. Last but not least, get a history of photography book. Don't think about equipment so much cause photo is a financial black hole. Think about pictures!