That is the magic formula. Study your subjects, and wait. . .

Just as if you were hunting with a firearm or bow.

Head looks like a Bogen. Skinny legs = light duty. Not worth keeping unless you don't mind a heavy, relatively unstable tripod.

It depends on your situation. If using it in daylight - start with 1/1600 and ISO 400. Overcast, 1/800 or longer, and so on.

Graphics processing speed is not critical to still image editing - so a mid-range graphics card with around 6 gb vram is all that is needed. When you buy a gaming machine, you are paying for a lot of graphics horsepower that you will never use. Kinda like buying a VW Golf to haul building materials.

Fast drives, enough ram (32gb or more), and if using Lightroom - a cpu with 8 cores + hyperthreading is where the money needs to be spend.

I built my last machine for a friend in 2018 - I just retired my desktop in use for 11 years - talk about dust!!!!

Agee with most of what you wrote with the following exceptions.

An AMD Ryzen 9 5900 or an and Intel i9 cpu on a laptop is a screamer, especially with Lightroom just as fast as on a desktop.
If one is transitioning from a desktop to a laptop - it's not an issue. I just did this myself - and I still use my dual displays, and I can still use the laptop screen if I want to.
Ram is upgradeable to 64gb, (I have 32gb) (2) m.2 NVMe PCIe drives total 4 TB, and a 2 TB SATA III SSD in the 2.5" internal drive bay.
Using the wireless mouse and keyboard I used with the desktop I only use the laptop's keyboard and touchpad when on the go and traveling light.

Other benefits - if you don't mind spending a few extra $$ you can seriously surpass most desktops. If someone is accustomed to not spending over $1K on a computer, this is not for them. They are trading off performance, storage capacity and general usefulness to save their pennies.

Making the transition has been the best thing I have done in a while with respect to computers since I bought my first IBM PC in 1984. BTW, that was a 4.77khz machine, with 640kb ram thanks to an AST Multifunction I/O card which added 384 Kb ram to the motherboard's native 256kb, Tecmar Graphics Master video card with 640-480 resolution in color, and a Hercules monochrome card with parallel port for the monochrome display, and dual 5-1/4" floppy disks, an Amdek Color display and an Amdek 300A amber monochrome display and it cost me almost $6,000 in 1984 dollars. I later bought a 10 mb hard drive for $800, which lasted about 5 months before it died. So my initial investment in 1984 was $6800, which would be almost $19,000 today, assuming the average inflation of 2.71% from 1984 to 2022, give or take.

https://www.inflationtool.com/us-dollar/1984-to-present-value

Most people today have no clue what constitutes a good price for a decent computer. So $1,800 a total bargain compared to the early ones.

Uh, they were all darkroom generated.

FYI, in a program like Lightroom or Photoshop you can specify the file size and the image size in a preset, takes about 3 seconds to make it a preset so that you don't have to go through this time consuming process all over again. Nice work, btw.

Badly underexposes is how a photographer who shuns processing would see it. Disastrous, actually, and ready for the circular file.

Adams, as you pointed out, exposed properly for the moon, having done so multiple times in the past there was no calculating involved, and no need for the light meter. His concern was that by doing so, did he get enough shadow information to make it a landscape photo, with foreground sky and his signature full range of tones. He typically custom-processed he negatives, but in this case he absolutely had to nail it - get enough workable detail in the moon, while being able process the faint shadows (very thin areas in a negative) and pray there was enough there above films base and any processing-induced fogging.

I'd say that this was one of his more challenging undertakings, and since he only had the single negative - he did try to take a second shot but the clouds had moved in the couple of seconds it took to change film holders (or reverse the one that he had in the camera if he was using a two sheet holder) and the composition was forever lost.

He had made a number of versions of this, early on the sky was lighter and the foreground darker. The clouds at the horizon also changed in brightness. At one point he made the decision to irrevocably treat the negative to a combination of selenium toner+HCA (hypo clearing agent), to proportionately build up contrast in the foreground. As new tools and techniques appeared, so did his treatment of Moonrise evolve.

The story is not obvious from viewing the print. But having had a foundation in wet chemistry darkroom, I could appreciate the challenge represented by the image, and how difficult it was to get the results he did. Needless to say, trying to evaluate his work on a computer screen is futile. Nothing substitutes for experiencing the majestic mastery of the real thing.

As one reviewer stated - of all the original versions of this image, no two are precisely alike.

In the digital age, sorry to say, this level of dedication is all but gone. There are true masters that will labor and experiment with software to get the results they want, and have the creative muse to know exactly what that looks like and the skills to make it happen. But they are few and far between.

This link shows some of the variants of moonrise:

https://www.google.com/search?q=moonrise+over+hernandez+before+and+after&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS908US908&oq=moonrise+over+hernandez&aqs=chrome.4.69i57j0i512l6j69i65.12069j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Possibly, unless you import with a preset that will rename the files.

Take a few minutes and explain that the device from Apple or Samsung or Pixel is actually a camera that has, as an added benefit, the ability to do some other things, like keep track of meds, health/exercise metrics, notes to self, keep photos easily accessible, a calculator, send messages to friends, listen to online radio programming, etc etc etc. You can even sneak in that it can make calls. But first and foremost it is a killer camera and is so small and portable it is easy to always have it handy.

Then show her these https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/cellphone/

If she still doesn't want a cellphone camera, then at least you gave it your best shot. . .

Then show her one of these:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1029529-REG/sony_dsc_w800_b_cyber_shot_dsc_w800_digital_camera.html

and this:

https://www.flickr.com/groups/sony-cybershot-dsc-w800/

And call it a day.

No. Even though I suspect you meant "convert it to jpeg" not raw.

To understand why, you'll need to shoot raw only for a while. The answer to your question will be the same one I provided. Even with subjects of average contrast you may find better dynamic range, detail retention and smoother color and tone gradation when you shoot raw, process in a large color space like ProPhoto in 16 bit, and convert to jpeg. Working in ProPhoto makes no sense if you start with a jpeg.

This may expand your understanding.

https://photographylife.com/srgb-vs-adobe-rgb-vs-prophoto-rgb

The advantage of shooting raw all the time is that there is zero chance you will be using jpeg when you really wanted raw. From the standpoint of results, raw serves up 100% of what you can get out of an image, and jpeg varies from 100% to zero, as I demonstrated in my pictures of the sky after a storm, where no jpeg worked, despite bracketing. So standardizing on a complete solution that works 100% of the time has its benefits. Standardizing on an incomplete solution that may not work for all situations is not as good.

You may want to take a look at http://ifp3.com/

They are set up for ecommerce with a shopping cart, lightbox, images are searchable, right click disabled, watermarkable, etc etc etc.

That is what you need if you want to get $$ for your work. Other photography ecommerce-specific sites include Zenfolio, Smugmug. Other simpler cloud solutions Like Dropbox are mostly intended for sharing not selling.

Well, that certainly explains the incongruous lighting in the second shot. The sun is low in the sky, and judging by the light off the clouds, the sun is ON THE LEFT of the image, while the mountains in the distance, and to a lesser degree, the arch on the lower right, are clearly showing light coming the RIGHT of the image. But the EXIF data shows a capture time of just before 5:00 AM on 11/1/21. Very disorienting.

As far as the image is concerned, it could make sense to reverse the sky so the light appears to come from the right. I do like the choice and it eliminates the halo around the arch in the first image.

Typically there are two main categories of photographers - documentarians who merely record and artists who create. Enhancing an image to your vision doesn't make you a liar - if done correctly and tastefully, as you mostly have done, it makes you a visual storyteller. I find the creatives far more interesting that documentarians . . . Just sayin'

The first floppy disks were 8" and held 80 KB and it was read-only IBM brought them to market in 1971. They cost $4.50 at Radio Shack

IBM was the first to make hard drives. They used to be called Winchester disks, and held 30 mb of fixed storage and 30 mb of removable storage. And yes, it was named after the rifle the Winchester Lever Action .30/30. Before that in 1953 they invented a storage computer the RAMAC, which was 5 mb and took up an entire room for the supporting electronics. That was 2 years after I was born.

I guess that that makes you not quite as old as me . . .