You've got a far better camera than I do, which is a D5200 and as far as I can tell, it's not crap. I love some of the photo contests where pros go out and get incredible pictures with the cheapest equipment possible and do great. It's the equivalent of landing a 10LB bass with a Snoopy rod and reel. Good equipment with more features has helped my photography a lot, but I think there's still a lot to be said for having an eye for what you're doing and being in the right places at the right times.

Nice job! I've been blessed to have gotten a few good shots of African fish eagles in Kenya, which look almost identical to our bald eagles. It was mostly serendipity and a good camera in my case. Looking forward to seeing more of your work.

Welcome, I'm relatively new here too and have already experienced a lot of the great helpfulness of this community of photogs. Always encouraging and offering constructive criticism. Looking forward to seeing your images.

Just old rubber boots and tires so far...I'll keep looking!

Great shot. Makes me wonder what the dog is thinking. Looks kind of wistful...

Magnificent shot. Is it HDR, or were you able to capture this range in one shot? Either way, very appealing...

Cool effect, I love that lens! Kinda gives me the swirlies, though...

Good video. I learned to shoot using aperture priority mode for most things. This will help me experiment with my settings a little more, but with a safety net that going fully manual doesn't provide. Thanks for posting this.

I did look at your Flickr page. All I can say is WOW! I now have something to aspire to. Not sure I'll live long enough, though. Kudos!!!

Nice job. What package did you use? I didn't mask out the bright area, I was just trying to see if there was enough info in the photo to bring up the detail in the snow.

Here's about 10 minutes worth of messing with the snow in Lightroom 5. I had to bring the red up a little for the sled and your daughter because they got darkened down too much. My main goal was to show we could do something with the snow and given a little more work, the vibrance could have been restored to the main subject. I will fool with this a little more in Photoshop Elements and in Lightroom and will let you know what I can do over the weekend when I have a little time. One suggestion is to shoot in RAW if your camera will allow it, there is a much bigger dynamic range in a RAW file and more dramatic adjustments can be made to one. Since we can only upload JPG or other compressed formats to UHH, it limits the amount of tinkering possible.

Does your camera have a Scene mode? There may be a preprogrammed mode for snowy day or backlit scenes like these. If so, take some pictures in that mode and then check what settings the automatic scene mode used once the pictures are in your computer by looking at the properties of each picture. This will be a good starting point for experimenting with more manual settings if you choose to do so. You might be able to adjust the exposure some in a package like Lightroom or Picasa to get more detail in the snow. You did a great job of capturing the action, you just need some help with settings or post processing of the pictures. May I download one and see what I can do as an example?

I get that question a lot. My humble reply is that I do a lot of human care ministry here in Austin as well, so I think I've got that covered. I always tell people that are worried about people here in the States that they should start a project to help where they see a need and I'll support it any way I can. But first, I think people should see the rest of the world and realize that even our poor people here are rich by global standards. I'm one of the leaders of a project that does vision and dental clinics all over Kenya, my church feels that going where the most people are, the slums, is where we can do the most good. I've been 10 times in the last 5 years and am returning this spring. And I make no apologies for it. It's been a blessing to those we serve and to us as well. That's my 2 cents, I'd rather concentrate on photography here and the question was about going through security with SD cards. I hope I didn't take the topic off track too far with my answer. My apologies if I have.

I go to Africa twice a year for mission work in the slums of Nairobi and I am blessed to be able to do photo safaris on either end of the work week. I take a laptop and copy my whole team's pictures to it nightly and I backup to an external hard drive as well. We have come back with as many as 8,000 images before. We've had cameras and SD cards die natural deaths, but those who heeded my daily backup advice didn't lose much. I always have an extra p&s loaner for the poor soul that drops or otherwise mutilates their gear. We've never had anything get ruined going through security, but SD cards and hard drives are always subject to problems from magnetism, so I like the idea of all of our pics being on 3 different types of media, the SD cards, the laptop and the external hard drive.

I'm a computer guy. I make more money off of people who have brothers-in-law that "know something about computers". It's like stealing...