Only thing I've ever been warned about both by the Nikon D5200 manual and the gurus here is to make sure your camera is off and VR is off on the lens when taking a lens on or off of the body. The lens supposedly makes a nasty clunk that doesn't harm anything if you don't follow this advice.

I have the D5200 and love it and it's features, but it's not a good all weather camera like the D7100. From everything I've read, it's a great body. I just wish it had the rotatable LCD monitor the D5200 has, which is very handy for short guys like me when you need to get shots above the crowd or from a low angle without laying on your belly. There are always compromises. For the extra money, you get more performance, like 6fps instead of 5fps in continuous mode, 1/8000 shutter speed vs 1/4000, 2-5 frame exposure bracketing vs only 3 exposures on the D5200, etc. Well worth the extra money and it or it's successor will probably be my next upgrade, since all of my glass will work with it. Good luck, I don't think it's possible to make a bad decision, just try each one out before you buy. One may just feel "right" to you.

They're all great, but I think I like the third one (1) in your post the best. I find the tone mapping a little happier. Wish I'd thought of this! If I'm not being rude, how did you do it?

Thanks for the kind words everybody. I know that I can take the RAW files from this set and do something pretty outstanding in Lightroom and/or PS. Sometimes, it's just fun to say they are what they are. I may go back on a cold winter day and blow up the heron and some other bird pics I got that day and see what I can do with them. That early morning golden hour light was special right after the sunrise. I probably won't do much of anything with the sky shots other than make sure they are level. Most lakes around here seem to be pretty horizontal most of the time. Here's one more with the early morning lighting.

Reeds at sunrise

I'm going on 62, is this what I have to look forward to? I have read that exhaling completely before your take a shot, in addition to having a good solid pose for what you're doing, will help steady your shots. I do use a monopod and/or a tripod when needed, especially for wide angle HDR shots like cityscapes.

I'm a computer guy and am learning all of the technical aspects of my equipment that I can. I'm confident I can and will do that. I'm not a born artist, but I do think you can learn what to look for, keep some basics in mind and take things to the next level. All of the basics like the rule of thirds and using leading lines have probably been beat to death here already. I saw one article where the author looks for curvy leading lines, like a snaking dirt road to lead your eye to the subject. Lately, I've been taking the first pictures that my instincts tell me will be pretty good and then I spend another hour or more just looking around for other angles of the same subject, other subjects in the immediate area, maybe step a foot or two to the right or left of where I was to see if something more interesting happens. Recently, I got my brother a nice p&s for his first decent camera and had him follow me around within 50 yards of his house, I with my DSLR and him with the new camera. We spent 2 hours and got some great macro pictures of flowers, some HDR fall color shots with dramatic clouds, we laid on our backs looking up at trees, etc. It was amazing what we could do without leaving his property. This is a good exercise wherever you go to shoot, whether it's intentional or serendipity takes you and your camera to somewhere cool. Also, I've personally learned a lot from Tony Northrup's How to Create Stunning Digital Photography and recommend the Kindle ebook at Amazon.com, since it has lots of links to his private youtube tutorials. If you get this book, when he updates it, you get the updates for free. It's only about $10, half the price of the wooden book.

Go to the Google Play Store and get Airdroid 2.0 on your phone. If you have a wireless network and the phone and PC are both connected (pc can be hard wired), you can use this app to download and upload and manage your phone's contents very easily. All you do is go to www.airdroid.com on the computer (it works best in Chrome, of course!) and then load Airdroid on the phone. You can snap a pic of the QR code on the screen and it automatically connects your phone and pc or you can manually log in with a number sequence displayed on your computer screen. It's free and solves a problem everybody has.

I'm a computer guy and up to this point we've been able to roll back most machines to a point in time before the infection using the System Restore function in Windows. This new variant encrypts your hard drive before asking for the ransom. You're really out of luck at that point. A good online backup like Carbonite or Mozy has versioning in it, meaning you can go back to the way your files were up to a month ago or so. Attached external hard drives and/or network drives may even be subject to these bad guys scrambling them. I wish these guys would spend all of this intellectual capital curing cancer. Apparently, the money is bigger doing this. I also look at the BBC, I spend a good deal of time in Africa doing mission work and like a different perspective on world events.

My fishing partner canceled at the last minute and I was in my bass boat before dawn. I didn't get a line in the water for the first hour, and you'll see why. I've only seen one other sunrise or sunset like this in the last 25 years, a sunset in Canada in 2000. These are unretouched photos out of a series of 50 taken with a Nikon D5200 and the 18-55 VR kit lens. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did living them. A great morning to be alive!

Beginning of a spectacular display










This guy watched the sunrise with me

I'm a computer guy, Jerry! Never replace a driver that is happily purring along. If it ain't broke, don't fix it! I make more money from customers that insist on monkeying with functional equipment thinking they'll gain some new feature. Ain't human nature grand!

Post-Christmas depression sets in... The photo says it all!

The Mustang really brought back a flood of youth in the late 60's and early 70's memories... Nice job

I concur on number 2, the clarity of the eye that you captured really makes it a stunner...

So glad I have a D5200. When the world comes to an end for DSLRs, maybe I'll have the last one standing that'll still take third party lenses....

I like this a lot. I'm new to light painting, what sort of light source did you use and what was the length of exposure? Or am I completely off base and this scene actually existed in nature? Anyway, well done...