Congrats on your new lens! B&H is awesome, in my opinion. Glad they came through for you. Yes the Z8 at 45 Mpx is much better than the D500 and 200-500mm lens. Why not replace the foot with an Arca Swiss one? It is usually the first thing that I do with any new lens. Have a fantastic time in Alaska. It is one of my favorite places (have gone 4 times for wildlife photography, twice previously for family vacations).

Bay Photo has a mind numbing variety of choices. I have done a limited number of prints (all were wildlife), some to metal, some to canvas and some to paper at Bay Photo. If you live in the Bay Area, you can take a drive to one of their facilities and see examples of each? And for metal, definitely no frames necessary.
PS. I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but this print wouldn't be that large, correct? The amount of detail in the feathers is not great.
PS. Just looked at my metal print orders and yes, did do rounded corners. Can't find which finish they were. I remember doing some with metal that were supposed to resist fading if they got direct sun.

Fortunately I saw some of the early reports of people having problems with the Sandisk SSDs so didn't buy one. Surprisingly, Sandisk/WD did not respond IMO responsibly when it was pretty clear there were problems with their products. So I won't be buying Sandisk products ever again.

Hmm, not sure this is an "American" phenomena. A prior more dangerous example I think of is the Takata (a Japanese company) airbags which were exploding in cars. It took many years for Takata to acknowledge the problem. Am sure there are many other examples, some of which are American and some foreign companies who denied problems that people were having. It is one of the reasons to read the posts in various forums like UHH, people will post about problems they have had. Some of which may be the fault of the poster, some of the product.

I think you meant to say Sandisk? Not Samsung?

Even if there was a 10-fold increase in failure rate (pure speculation on my part), that could move the failure rate from 0.1% to 1%, so the majority of SSD users would not have a problem. Personally, I feel where there is smoke, there is likely fire. To save $50 (the difference between a Samsung 4TB SSD and a Sandisk 4TB SSD), I would not risk it. Glad you have had no problem with your Sandisk SSDs. Personally I will avoid them (and I used to only buy Sandisk memory cards). Not sure we will ever know the truth, but have read enough photographer's complaints about the Sandisk SSD problem to think there is something to it.

Instagram is not at all (IMO) video based, most of the professional photographers I follow post primarily photos. It is indeed a vast universe and the professional photographers I follow are presumably trying to encourage people to sign up for trips with them or masterclasses though often they do advertise sales for their photos, etc via links to other sites. You might check it out for a professional photographer you know.

Would you expect Sandisk to report on the failures of their SSL drives? Don't think this would happen. Instead Sandisk put them on sale. Personally, I respect hearing individuals experiences. I heard about the Sandisk SSL failures first by an individual photographer a couple years ago. Since then, there have been many reports as well as lawsuits filed:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/lawsuit-takes-western-digital-to-task-over-sandisk-ssds-allegedly-erasing-data/

Not sure if this is correct, but isn't 500px owned by a Chinese company? And they limit the number of free uploads per week? And one sells photos through Getty? I know people who use it but have not personally used it.
Smugmug (which I use) allows one to customize their website and to sell photos through them directly. They charge for the unlimited uploads package.
I also use Flickr which again charges for unlimited uploads but provides a "community" of users to comment on photos, etc.
More and more photographers are posting on Instagram, don't know if one can sell photos through that site.
Will be curious to see what others post.

There have been many reports on the failures of the Sandisk SSDs over the last few years. But good for you to refresh people's memories. When I bought my SSDs, I went with Samsung. There are a number of other manufacturers as well so personally, would not go near a Sandisk SSD (I used to only use Sandisk memory cards by the way). Sorry this happened to you.
One recent report:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/22/23733267/sandisk-extreme-pro-failure-ssd-firmware

The D500 (which I still have and my wife uses) works fine with the batteries for the recently introduced Nikon Z8. So not a problem in this case at the present time.

There are many potential causes of vibration even when using a tripod which could benefit from the image stabilization of a lens and camera being on, including the movements of the shutter, wind moving the lens, your pressing the shutter button, etc However in the "early days" of image stabilization one could see that turning off this system would result in a sharper photo (I actually did some tests a number of years ago and saw this) when the unit was on a tripod. However with the newer image stabilization systems this is not very common.

oops duplicate post

Wow, can even see a solar flare!