I use one of these: https://www.amazon.com/LumiQuest-SoftScreen-Flash-Diffuser-Neon/dp/B0777X1WM2

I fully agree. Nothing can beat the Nikkor 105 f2.8 macro. But one thing that comes in really handy is a ring light flash.

Of note is that flash memory, such as SD and microSD cards, have a life limited by the number of write cycles. The card can be read as much as you want. You just want to keep writes to a minimum. Each storage location, i.e. one bit, is a microscopic transistor in the flash memory (almost always 'nand' flash memory).

Through many write cycles the transistors lose their ability to change from ones to zeros. That is, they stay charged up. Multilayer nand flash memory has a worse problem with 'wear', but will fit more storage in a smaller space, such as a SD card.

Flash drives, including SD-type storage, have software on the drive, AND within the controller (within the camera); a wear-leveling mechanism to prevent large areas of the card from wearing out, while other areas exist that have seen little of no use. The same mechanism that performs wear-leveling also parallelizes writes, to obtain the high speeds seen with SD-type memory..

Nand flash is much slower than mechanical disks or DDR memory, but the writes go to many locations simultaneously, increasing write speed by a factor of 100 or more. Wear-leveling stores a list of bad blocks (areas that cannot be written reliably), on the drive itself.

Those areas are simply blocked by the wear-leveling algorithm. Reformatting is only 'necessary' in the most ancient of devices using the most ancient SD cards. Otherwise, formatting serves only to clear the memory card of old contents, and to 'trim' the drive. trimming should be done occasionally, or the dr9ve capacity will drop.

With 'format', only the file system is overwritten, a tiny fraction of the drive. Most of the contents are recoverable.

Scary as it may seem, it is actually possible to waste money on camera gear!

If I would have not learned the rote, mechanical basics first, but concentrated on composition instead, my first photos would have been poor, and I would have lost interest. If a teenager is not willing to commit to learning the correct way to make excellent images, he'll never like photography, because refusal to learn the exposure triad is pathetic laziness, as is refusal to expend effort and time to obtain a desirable result.
50% of online content is: 'how to get something valuable without expediture of time, effort or money!' If we keep people busy trying to do the impossible, there will be plenty of room at the top for my kids!
The exposure triad is the simplest concept imagineable! I can't get the image I want with "program mode". Sometimes priority makes sense, but usually it's manual with auto ISO and a certain AF mode. When I got my first calculator for engineering, my Dad got me the best one. WHY?, because I was committed! Consequently, I was in graduate-level physics my by my sophomore year!
Let's not have them lose interest. Well, you can't rent a camera affordably for an entire year of school. So, the student must be committed to working dilligently, because of the expense necessary for them to even have a chance at success. Do you get a child a violin that's missing one string, or a flute that is chopped off to 3/4 of it's ordinary length, or a guitar that has strings that don't hurt a little bit at first? No, because nylon strings sound bad.
Babying kids is the best way to end up with them living at home until their mid-thirties, unemployed, refusing to do anything that requires the least bit of effort, and using your credit card for online purchases of.video games, sex toys, and porn.
My kids are savvy go-getters, fearing God more than man; college educated professionals who will make a difference
for the better, and marry, reproduce, and add quality new people to the world; not have mongrels out of wedlock who add to the aggregate of dysfunctional malcontents!
So, 50-200 budget is guaranteed failure in the long run, because it makes impossible to capture what the creative eye sees! A photography class is not something one does as a recreational activity. I learned how to
shoot from books. My Dad had done pro work, but he told me I had to learn on my own. He did get me a Nikon F2 and a 85mm f1.8, after I showed him I was serious, by learning how to use a camera on my own! That was like a dream come true. I used it until the N90 came out. And I knew how to capture anything! I rented lenses and lighting from Helix.
But, the foam mirror damper got sticky from age. So, I sold it. It was still usable, but for how long?
Every kid is surrounded by professionally made Images. How is a kid
supposed to be motivated of he knows it is impossible for
him to produce professional results. Whenever I've done anything, it's been to be the best, or at least at that level! Even with drinking, I was one of the best! Then, I got married. She didn't appreciate my profficieny in that area, so I slowed down to a married-guy level.
Sorry to disagree, but greatness cannot be built on a foundation of mediocrity!

LR is not a relational database manager. It has 1/1000 the flexibility and power of MySQL or Access. And, it's proprietary, so no one can write front ends for it. My brother, rest his soul, used Access to make the best photo database I've ever seen. I have it now. It's utterly fantastic! It isn't limited by keywords, file names and attributes, and it even had the outputs of image analysis filters, to determine light, dark, percentage skin tone, B&W, outdoors, indoors, % white content, digitally altered, human face(s), human subjects, motion, among others.
Along with image properties, shooting parameters, lens model, body model, and a unique key field to differentiate each image.
But he was a database consultant/manager. He used Access because it runs under Windows, and it has nice automation features. Bit it's far from a commercial relational database. The time you put in up front is the time-saving multiplier you'll reap hence. I can back up his whole database in a series of files corresponding to audio, images, settings, tables, text; macros, VB routines and SQL; so it could rebuild the entire thing in a matter of hours. He has scanned images of our great grandparents, snapshots from point and shoots, negatives and slides from film days.
A portion of it pertains to our family history in images.
But, I guess if you want something simple, Darkrable, LR, and the like might work. But, mostly everything will just get lost eventually, because you forget what you had, or how you categorized it. That may be a blessing and lifting of a burden, because most photos have no particular value. They were great at one time. But interest fades over time, and we move on to the next interesting projects.
.

The first order is to use the camera's file naming function for your various jobs. If you are shooting Cindy Smith, start the filenames with her name. You can also add dates, but the file attributes also have that. Or, if your shooting in a certain place, such as Miami, FL, start the filenames with that and the date.

If your shooting swimsuit models, make the filenames begin with the name of the exposition or competition, the location, and the date. You get the drill. Then, use a front end to MySQL, like mariadb. There, you link keywords, link photos together, with short bios, audio clips, clothing manufacturers, shoe manufacturers, stylists names, digital enhancements performed (Photoshop will export hot-key sequences), and anything else you may prefer.
Using relational tables also permits minimum data input, because you can use the same records, or fields, again and again.
Then you can really drill down in your queries.

Is this according to the "Chicago Manual of Style"? If not, it is not authoritative.

There seems a level of faith placed in tech-support agents that is not warranted. They don't have access to 'all truth'. I called and was told to send in my 300mm, D810, and 2x tele, because the combo was f8, which autofocus is supposed to work up to, but it was very slow due to 'breathing', and just missing.
No, there was absolutely no possible way avoid sending everything in!
I doubted that conclusion. I googled the exact models of equipment together in one query, and the nikonusa.com website had a page describing the problem, with a firmware update to fix it. The update was easy, and completely fixed the problem!
So, trusting tech support and repair agents appears to be halfway to suicide.
Obviously, the problem was well-known to Nikon, or there wouldn't have a page on the website describing it. But tech support were clueless to it's existence, much less the solution provided by Nikon.
The mirrorless equipment has much less R&D and experience backing it up than the dslr equipment has. That means: to identify unidentified manufacturing defects and firmware errors, Nikon needs the equipment back in their hands. But why not place much--if not all--of the cost on out-of-warranty customers?
I rarely trust tech support to know every possible option and/or solution. But, I'm also a popular blogger, so that helps me once I get above tech-support level.

Sensual beauty is an art medium. The final image bears little resemblence to initial frame. This short series has the basics covered. The raw material is nearly there. Just a bit of shadow that won't process out.
One common error is to make Glam photography 'fair' to all women. Given that her beauty is an 'art medium', the model serves as the basis for the final piece of art. Postprocessing is lacking.

I haven't been able to discover whether the first and second shots are exactly the same composition. I know with certain immunizations the initial shot is different than subsequent ones. I'm nearly certain that the first shot programs the body to recognize the virus, and to produce antibodies. And the second one is purely to stimulate antibody production.

Comparing Nikon to Canon in terms of income or profit, and using that as insight into the DSLR market, is not rational. Nikon generates most of its income from DSLR equipment, whereas Canon does not. But perhaps I will contact Nikon, as I have meant to, to offer suggestions, such as to write an ide for app development to exploit the Nikon DSLR platform. Presently, it is not feasible to develop DSLR apps, because it's to small a market.

jpg is a means to make image files small on the hard drive. The format is compressed on the drive, and expands in memory. It's a good way to fit a lot of photos on a disk drive, or camera storage. Raw is however the camera represents its reading directly off the sensor, before it converts it to jpg.
A digital photo artist or pro photog. would always prefer raw format. But if there's no requirement for editing, jpg works.

I use ImageMagik:
https://imagemagick.org/script/download.php

Darktable:
https://www.darktable.org/install/

GIMP:
https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

All are free, with superb editing algorithms that rival or surpass LR and/or PS. They all run on Win/Mac/Linux. None will be easy as a program you have been using for decades.

But the above all work nondestructively. There are no reviews or comparisons of current versions of any of the above vs LR and/or PS. But and extension or brush that works with PS will work with GIMP. GIMP starts out simple, and it grows by adding modules, extensions, brushes, or activating modes that are turned off by default.

Programs like Picasa and infraview degrade lossy image formats, like jpg, each time an image is altered and saved.

I had about 300 images I needed altered to the same resolution, same outer dimensions on the long side, whether that was the vertical or horizontal, and I needed lossless processing. That job took three minutes with ImageMagik.

I put a laptop on eBay.com. But a dark display is not attractive, and a photo of the actual display looks pretty bad. So, I used my own photo, put it over the display in the laptop photo, pulled one edge down a bit, because the perspective wasn't perfectly 90 degrees on all corners, and ended up with a spectacular image of the display. It is worth 100.00. It sold for 279.00!

That photo edit took about five minutes with GIMP. And I didn't need to open a single menu.

Darktable is a photography workflow application. It is really only absolutely 'necessary' for raw images. It understands the formats of most raw images. If your camera isn't on the list, you just need to take picture in raw format, and upload it on darktable's website.

The developers will reverse engineer the format, and add it to the program. Most raw-image formats are automatically recognized.

This is vs. the camera software, which can read and convert one raw format to a few different compressed formats like jpg.

Darktable organizes and stores images in a structure that makes it trivial to find the image you want, based on how long ago you last opened it, the overall level of lightness or darkness, percentage of skin tone, dimensions, resolution, and I don't know what all else. It also allows one-step back-up to external media.

All of the above allow lossless editing that does not alter the original image. But, the user can choose to overwrite the original image. So, until the user is absolutely sure he has the final product he wants, he can either start over, or back off the changes made, and redo as necessay.

It's all intuitively obvious, right out front, no digging around. And adding text is so simple.I could use GIMP as soon as I opened it the first time. As I've grown in my abilities, I have been able to add to GIMP according to what my imagination requires.

I use ImageMagik:
https://imagemagick.org/script/download.php

Darktable:
https://www.darktable.org/install/

GIMP: