If an expense puts hardship on you, stop consuming! Top 10 ways to save money:

Live on a cash basis, paying off all credit before there is a charge.
Get married and stay married.
Eat nutritious, home-prepared meals.
Have one used family car.
Perform your own home repairs.
Buy good furniture and carpeting once.
Save and invest 10% of your income.
Live in housing below your means
Before going shopping, make a list, and stick to it.
Don't go shopping to figure out what you need.

Megapixels? Older lenses then had to pick up the real world, which is about 2 billion MP ON A 24X36 FRAME. Old lenses could resolve 120 lines per millimeter. So, someone figure out how that relates to MPs.

I just took some CD-Rs out after 15 years, and they're perfect.Very reliable storage media.

I implore the Lord God Almighty for the conversion of the USA back to Christianity. You do realize the battle is against liberals who want all Christians dead, and the righteous who wish to live a sensible existence based on polite discourse, peace, cooperation and Jesus Christ--the ultimate founder of the nation under God.

But Satan wouldn't be using 'all' Their ammunition if They were winning. And, liberals reproduce poorly. Marriage and family are the ultimate acts love. Christians reproduce the best, so their genetic traits survive. But every woman who doesn't reproduce is weeded out of the living gene pool.

So, everyone must do their best to express their faith and what it has done for them. I know people who attend church services and v**e democrat. I just tell them 'liberals h**e God, you included.'

In the 2022 e******n a wise-ass little crypto-currency punk diverted pensions, life savings, and every other penny he could swindle, and funneled 70 million extra dollars into democratic campaigns. That is the sole reason the e******n was not a wholesale slaughter on the part of decent politicians who want peace and prosperity, not draconian control over every aspect of everyone's lives but their own.

And don't just pray. Write paper letters succinctly describing your views, especially against the partisan justice system!

Since 2000A.D., I've bought every lens off eBay. You get the best price and the highest quality. Nothing else even comes close! No middle man. Direct from seller to buyer. I just made a purchase for around $150.00. The item was damaged, so I sent it back. Got a full refumd the day it was delivered back to the seller.

The seller has nothing to do with it. EBay refunds your money, and then collects it from the seller. You simply can't go wwrong! I bought a Nikon 300 f/4 P that goes for $2000 new, for $900 absolutely mint!You usually get about 1/2 off retail for a really nice lens. Beaters are much less. And the selection is the best by far!

Some of my best shots were with a 5MP point and shoot. You shoot with what you have. Money doesn't buy great photos any more than it buys great golf shots. The magic in in the magician, not the wand.

You might also consult an astrologer to see if Jupiter was aligned with Venus when all this occurred. That could explain a lot!

Gimp has amchat room you can go to to get fast answers. You'd have to look it up, but I think it's on freenode.net. That's where the developers hang out.

I've owned gray-market stuff. It isn't that Nikon won't repair it. You jjust have to ship it within the market it was made for. So, if a Chinese photographer hadma U.S.A. warranty, he'd have to ship from the US to a service center in the US, WHICH COULD BE PROBLEMATIC FOR SOMEONE IN CHINA!

If you have a photo printer, you can print test targets. Or you can purchase test targets, but they're in the hundreds of dollars range. I printed my own, and they work very well. I set up in the basement. Aim the lens, turn off all ligjts, lock up the mirror and open the shutter, and then use flash for the correct duration.

I use asa 100, test all the stops up to 16, test 3-4 focal lengths on a zoon, 2 of which are the extremes. The best zoom I ever tested was a Nikon 200-400 AF ED VR G. What a superb piece of glass. Nothing will resolve the whole target, but that lens was all sweet spot up to f/11.

I'm not a big fan of zooms. You lose a lot more shots with them. And it isn't that much footwork to do your own zooming. Wide zoom ranges all suck! Hate to say it, but you just can't put that much into a lens and still get good performance.

One of my goto for indoor candids is a zoom, though, a 24-120 f/4 that looks great at f/4 on 24 and 120. It's kind of a heavy clunk for what it is, but it outperforms almost everything in it's class. I shoot in vivid color mode if I'm doing jpgs, and that works perfect on that setting. It adds life to dead objects.

I also use it a lot for eBay.com photos. The better the photos of a nice looking item, the more you'll get for it. I frequently get more on a sale than I originally paid for an item. I've sold about $50,000 worth of stuff on ebay since I joined. You can make money on stuff you don't want. The last time I had a problem was at least 20 years ago.

I can pretty much look at a zooms range and tell you if it's any good.

Here's a video on moving the 'Users' directory to a different drive: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=88isPOPkscE
If you install your programs to C:\, and put all you user-generated files on D:\ or E:\ (the 'Users' directory), you'll have plenty of room without physically altering the computer. But there are quite a few steps. You can take a look at it.

I went all through NYC, on foot, carrying the camera by the lens barrel. As I've gotten older, I've started using a strap. But I've never dropped a camera. I'll pull the camera off the tripod before I let my hand off the tripod with the camera attached. Yes, it can be a pain, but I've got a perfect record so far. Also, setting up in the menu is much better with a strap than just holding the camera so you can see the screen.

I've never seen only certain cameras permitted. It's always, "No Photography Allowed," or, in the absence of that, it is presumed photography is allowed. And what's with wedding photographers can't use dslrs. What have they 'been' using!? I'll tell you what's really noisy is the Flintstone's camera with the bird inside chiseling the image on a stone tablet! Those cameras have been banned since primordium, probably due to noise!

I definitely would not pay for Fotor. I serious doubt its claims for the size of its user base. That would make it one of the most popular services in the world. It doesn't do much, and it isn't worth much. I use GIMP and Darktable, both free, and not software as a service. This is real software. Online ssrvices are just an excuse to invade privacy.

One neat trick is to make a md5 hash of each photo, which is a unique number based on a cryptographic hash of the file contents, in order to track you across devices, and across computer upgrades. It takes about 1/10 second to perform an md5sum, and then every device you store photos on which has also been identified as being owned by you when you sign up for an online service, or even just use the service, is traceable, forever, or until you get rid of all your photos.

Law-enforcement takes particular interest in this method, because anyone who uses an online photo service can be located within a short time, based on which hash sums match their photos. But, no one cares about privacy, because they aren't doing anything wrong. But a few changes to the law, like repealing the First Amendment, and forbidding the free expression of thought, could land you in a reeducation camp for 10 years where you are left to perish from exposure, disease, starvation and exhaustion.

Whatever one says on the net is forever. It never completely goes away. It can always be located later, at any time. I looked up my Internet history on the dark web. I am one of the most careful privacy advocates on earth's surface! There are records of me from 20 years ago, all fully at the government's disposal.

Didn't mean to scare anyone. Just wanted to wake you up.

So, if you're going to use software as a service, don't have strong beliefs in favor of the second amendment or religion, because you'll eventually be marked for apprehension. And, encrypt your phone. It's easy. If you get stopped, the police can make an exact copy of you phone's contents, even if they don't know the pin or password. But is the info in encrypted, no one can read it without your phone, because it holds the encryption key, and the encryption is such that it would take all the energy created by the Universe, since the Big Bang, to power computers to crack it. And, even if you had that much energy, it would still require 8 million years.

I use MySQL, like Microsoft Access without all the license fees. That way I can make any changes I want to the entire structure of the database in just a few simple steps. I use czkawka as a duplicate finder, which will also find 'similar' photos and videos if you want it to. I used it on a garbage pile PC, where everything just gets dumped. If found 97,000 duplicate photos, and it works with RAW of any type, because it analyzes each image using a cryptographic hash. That took about 5 minutes to find the dupes, and a few minutes to delete them. But I reclaimed 100s of GBs of disk.

I arrange my photos by project. And I use the file-naming function in the camera to give all the photos a meaningful name unique to that project. I put each project's photos in a table, and link all the tables into a bigger table. Each record has all the fields I need for date, occasion, location, model(s), unique ID across the entire database, conditions, exif data parsed into multiple fields per record, copyright holder, my legal rights, job rating, errors, description; and some more obscure; and every one of those is optional..

But I admit, there is a learning curve to the SQL (pron, sequel) language. But there is a learning curve to everything worthwhile, even a camera body.