My lovely 23 yr old daughter has developed a love for travel as well as a talent for photography well beyond my abilities, and I'm a bit jealous.
Her equipment is becoming more sophisticated and correspondingly expensive as well.
Combine that with my love of practical jokes (at her expense), I've developed a intricate & devious plan to absolutely devastate her and then gleefully surprise her at the same time. Please tell me what you think.

We have plans in place to go back to beautiful Iceland this summer for 2 weeks mainly to explore the various waterfalls and mountain peaks, photographing them in detail as we go.

Her birthday will fall during this time, and I plan on upgrading her equipment to a Nikon D810 as a surprise. Of course I will have brought it along, bragging that it is 'MY' new camera.

Now for the practical joke:

I plan to "borrow " her current Nikon D7200 body with the intent of photographing her, as we stand in a precarious position above a cliff , a waterfall or other similar location.

As she stands watching, I'll make a point to change out a lens on what she assumes is the current D7200, fumbling to the point were she sees me 'accidently' drop her camera body perhaps hundreds of feet down to the ground or into the water. I will of course have changed out the D7200 body with an old non-working D40 i just picked up off of EBay for a few bucks -having safely ensconced the D7200 in my bag.

Oh, the look of sheer horror i expect to see on that beautiful face.

Of course being the dutiful dad I am, I will immediately offer up 'my' brand new D810 and the corresponding lenses as a sacrifice for her loss ( which was really for her anyway). I'm just wondering at what point should I hand back the original D7200 and try not to laugh so hard?

I drove to Lookout Point in Yellowstone on April 25 as the weather was the best in weeks and new snow had fallen during the night. The scenes were spectacular and wildlife was everywhere and few tourists! Here is lower falls from the point. I like the snow still in the scene, but the huge ice dome in front of the fall is gone, unlike during the winter photo tours I lead. The last image is rustic fall in the northern part of Yellowstone. It was the best I had ever seen it with all of the runoff going on. All images were shot with a Canon 1DX Mark II, manual exposure, and I used a magnified live view image to focus on the scene. I keep the live image activated to keep the mirror in the upright position for sharper images. Exposure is simple. Add light until the first "blinkies" show up in the image and use that exposure when shooting RAW, but darken it slightly if shooting JPG. I processed these images with the latest version of Canon's DPP4, and darkened the highlights and increased the shadows just a bit to reduce the contrast. I normally don't get to photograph in Yellowstone this time of the year as I am normally leading tours or teaching seminars far away, so it was truly a pleasure to spend such a wonderful day in the park! I am letting you know late April is a super time to be in Yellowstone!!!

As is well known, the Ministry of Mayhem is delighted and proud to have on staff an ample supply of beautiful Dark Ladies. What is perhaps less known is that these Dark Ladies are dark only in name, and are in fact beings of Light and Learning, adept in the use of magic, and at bewitching the unwary.

In another place and time, with their great beauty, one might go so far as to suggest these Dark Ladies were once known by another name.

Dark Lady Kimberly looks every bit the part, even without the wings.

My understanding wife of many years indulged me with a Nikon D750. I couldn't wait to take it for a spin so I went out to a site about 30-40 minutes away. I have never been happy with my shots of this subject. It just lay there in the back of my mind like unfinished business; there was something I hadn't been able to adequately capture. It is a place I intend to visit many times more but I came closer this time to what my mind's eye imagines. While this is pleasing to me, I am confident that this place has many more stories to tell.