I answer with "This is Mike", or George, or William, or whatever. Robo calls are programed to respond to Hello or its equivalent in several popular languages. If there's more than a 2-second pause I hang up.

The picture of the blue heron with a piece of wood in his beak was one of ten fast ones of the same bird and the only one with him holding the wood, so I think he must have mistaken it for something to eat. It is my favorite to include with birthday cards for my older friends. The caption says, "Flat footed, skinny legs and bad eyesight! It's hell to get old."

Just for the fun of it, here's one of an egret that I took ten years ago.

Great shots! I think everyone loves to photograph egrets and herons, especially here in Houston since we're close to the Gulf and those birds stand still most of the time. I have spent a lot of time with my camera on local golf courses -- and once in a while I get lucky and photograph one of the birds doing something ridiculous, like the blue heron whose curiosity got the best of him.

Our house is 82 feet above sea level and the San Jacinto River south of us reached 67 feet. That's fifteen feet, a distance of three blocks and a world of difference. The Kingwood Photo Club had many members whose houses were flooded and many of us pitched in to help one of our members hurriedly digitize thousands of old photos in albums that would need to be thrown in the trash. The photo below shows the rescue boats being staged at a church at the top of the flooded area three blocks from our house. An estimated 136,000 homes and businesses were flooded in the Houston area when Hurricane Harvey dumped around 50 inches of rain in 4 days (I believe that's more than Seattle's annual total). A TV news crew there from Little Rock said it was too windy and rainy for their camera and watched as I struggled with my camera and an umbrella to get the picture.

Here are a few of mine taken through the years.

Bill, the truth as I tell my students, is that a good photographer learns and improves with age. His/her camera only has to be good enough to capture the image in the photographer's head. A fantastic woodworking tool is only as good as the person using it. It doesn't matter what the tool is capable of doing, it's still just a tool. In other words, owning a Maserati doesn't make someone a great race car driver and it doesn't make any difference if the D850 is better or not.

To all who responded: I tested several versions all the way up to Jerry's model and found that the answer to my photography needs seemed to be more general RAM with a decent graphics card that could handle the input of a high-end monitor like the ViewSonic and a solid state hard drive -- I settled on two 500mb SSD's instead of one, because I already have 2t of external drives. More graphics RAM was not as noticeable as at least 16mb of general RAM, which eliminated the need for a gaming quality video card with its extra cooling demands and greater power supply requirements. (The expert that I questioned said that video [gaming] processing needs are not the same as graphics [photography] needs.) I settled on the Asus 970 Pro gaming motherboard. Not counting the time it took to assemble the entire machine, my cost, including the new monitor, was around $1,800. I used only new, highly rated parts that were unfortunately not on sale at the time and my friend said I could have reduced that by looking for a refurbed monitor and less expensive parts.

The difference is astounding. A time consuming task in LR that takes minutes on my old machine now takes only 15 seconds on the new one and the UHD monitor makes it fun to watch. Boot time is reduced significantly because of the SSD drives, but my three computers are only booted about twice a week each, so I'm thinking that I spent money that I didn't really have to.

Thanks for the fast replies. He is pricing everything at his cost plus 18% and his cost is at wholesale. Re: monitors. They can either be deleted from the order altogether or substituted for a larger one -- he told me that he uses a 32 inch and wishes it were only 24 after seeing mine. (My new one is a top of the line Viewsonic that has UHD and 4k resolution). I'll ask him about the Apple OS, but he has every machine tested before it ships out and tells me that Windows has improved to the point that it makes sense to install it rather than the more expensive Apple OS. I also know that he installs 500 mb SSD hard drives, since they boot so much faster, but he can add more hard drive capacity and match it to your requirements. Mine has a 1T normal drive in addition to the SSD. Mine also has 12 mixed-USB ports so I don't need the 7-port external that I use with the old computer. He told me that he will not start unless he has at least 10 firm orders, so I'll keep everyone posted.

A close friend owns a company that has been solving computer problems for big companies all over the world for many years. I mentioned to him that my 8mb-RAM-with-shared-video laptop was frustratingly slow in some of my LightRoom post-processing tasks and that my son-in-law's gaming computer was faster but for the big bucks it cost it was not ideal for my photography needs. He custom-built one for me that literally runs circles around my old machine and offered to do the same for any of my friends -- offering good, better and best models turnkey (including the best components, 24" monitors and Windows 10 Pro) for a lower cost than they can buy one on the market. I know how much good photography equipment costs, and the cost of these would be a lot less than some of us spend on our cameras and lenses.

I told him that I would see how much interest there might be and let him know. If you think you might be interested let me know. (No obligation).

Mike

Don, I have published three books on how to successfully start and run a business (it was my profession for forty years to help entrepreneurs overcome barriers to growth). Great photographers are the operations side of a business but they also need good sales and administration talent (finance, management, etc.). Start with the fact that the vast majority of cell phone users don't know squat about composition and most are into selfies and grandchildren. (OK, I have a wealthy friend -- inherited -- who's into location shots since he and his wife seem to travel all the time, but he couldn't sell dollar bills for fifty cents). They are not competition and can be ignored. You don't sell photography based on the quality or expense of your equipment, but on your ability to capture what a client wants.

Suggestion: Find a market niche that you enjoy and are good at, identify the probable market, have good presentation materials -- website, business cards, etc. -- then approach the members of your target market and tell them you're looking for business. It's out there and you'll get enough for a start. Photography is an industry where you get the vast majority of your sales based on your reputation so it tales longer to become successful, and it takes constant work to find new clients, but there will always be photographers who make it.

To paraphrase something Henry Ford is often quoted as saying, "If you think you'll succeed or you think you'll fail, you'll be right."

Interview successful photographers, then write your thesis.

Thanks, Bill. I realized long ago that the camera (and lens) only have to be good enough to capture what's in your head when you take a picture. Having a Maserati doesn't mean you are a race car driver.

I'm happy that my friends can afford expensive gear.

Just for the fun of it, here's another of my pictures from that field trip. It was a closeup of water falling down a rope that was extremely difficult to photograph.

About a dozen members of Our photo club went to Moody Gardens, a large indoor complex in Galveston where the folks stay on a track and the animals and flowers are free to do their thing. Some of the members had really expensive gear (one had a camouflaged 600mm lens that he said he paid almost $15,000 for that was so heavy that it mounted on his tripod and the camera hung from the back of the lens), but I only had a 10mp fixed-lens Lumix that would zoom out to about 500mm and a 30-year-old tripod. I felt like I had a reasonable chance to equal their work, though, because I taught artistic composition at a local junior college and we wouldn't be in any giant fields looking for birds to photograph.

I have none of theirs to show, so you'll just have to take my word for it that I succeeded. The following are a few of my shots. I challenge my fellow UHH members to do better.

According to Macphun's website Luminar is coming for PC this fall. They have a link that allows you to sign up for an email notice at:

https://macphun.com/pc.

Thomas, it's a beautiful photo either way, but I would tell my students to work on number one and, keeping the same ratio, crop it on the right, top and bottom (roughly as I've done here in about thirty seconds). I believe the reason many like number one is the way the tree branches come in from the left and lead one's eye across the photo. My crop keeps that effect but moves the owl out of the bullseye position. [The crop could be done better, but I did it fast just to give the example.]

Since monitors only display 72dpi regardless of how sharp the picture is, I use my computer's MS Explorer to send pictures via email. Highlight the file, right click, choose "Send To", pick "mail recipient", choose the size picture you want to send, from small to large or even original, then Windows will attach it to an email in my normal program and wait for me to type in the recipient's address. This is the way we send four pictures to our photo club for display to the crowd at our monthly meetings (our club has over 100 members, so we've been asked to limit the file sizes of the ones we submit -- not because of sharpness while being projected, but because of space limitations on the presenter's computer). Otherwise, transferring it via thumb drive is the simplest.

The picture below is an example. It was projected onto a large screen that could be seen easily by the entire group although it was reduced in size to only 800x547 when I sent it.