First I need to know if you are as adept with a D5100 and the lenses in my signature. No other gear.
After paying for the 2 round trips I won't have money for any new gear!
Specifically? Just the 18-105mm. The rest? The way I look at it, eggs is eggs, so there's nothing there that doesn't have an analogous body/lens in my kit somewhere.
That said, even if you were seriously willing to ship me and a guest 1/2 way around the world, I am absolutely the wrong person to teach
anyone photography. There's nothing you can learn from me that staring at 500px for a while and watching some decent training videos won't get you a lot cheaper. If I am an honest evaluator of myself it's in digital darkroom that I might have something to teach folks.
Taking the photo comes down to two things for me, and you can have these absolutely free:
1. Training your eye to see in a 4x6 frame, and being able to compose into that from where you are - and learning to move somewhere else when it's not working.
2. Understanding how ISO, Shutter Speed and Aperture interact together to make a proper exposure, and how aperture influences depth of field and how it can be used to better frame the subject of your photo.
If I can get something usable out of those two things from where I'm standing then I know I can make a pleasing photo once I get them imported onto my laptop. I'm working to level the field, but I have to be honest and (continue to) say that the photos you're looking at in this thread don't often look anything close to that when I take them out of the camera. But knowing what I can do on the back end helps me understand what I need to capture when I'm staring at something - like "Is one frame enough or is this a situation that calls for HDR?", or "Since I can't position myself properly to capture this subject as I'd like (i.e. I can't stand on a 10 foot ladder, I can't move 20 feet to the right because of a 30 foot gorge, etc.) how do I adjust what I see in the frame so I have enough dead space in the right places to apply perspective correction?"
Case in point? I went out to shoot architecture and, like an idiot, had only a 16-35mm lens on my D600, not realizing until I got there how it would impact the lines of the buildings.
But, knowing that I could correct all sorts of things in post, from bad perspective to the godawful back-lighting, I was able to capture the frame in a way that left me room to fix what needed fixing. Otherwise, what you see coming out of the camera is by no means impressive, and almost embarrassing. LOL
Now, this was purposefully processed on the heavy handed side, but I could have stopped at perspective and light correction. And there's no way I could make this photo without Photoshop CC and either the onOne or Nik Suite - at least without spending hours and hours in Photoshop.
The point is, the better you know your strengths and weaknesses, and the more deeply you can understand the tools you are working with, the more likely you are to come up with an image you're happy with. There's not a lot of magic to it, just a lot of work and a lot of shooting. I'm in the process of reworking my Lightroom catalogs and I've got almost 10,000 images to deal with since I bought the D7000 in early 2011 - and that's just the stuff I've kept (I've easily got a keeper ratio of about 10-15% at most). That's a lot of shutter actuations.
So, if you still want to fly me over, I'm happy to go out shooting with you. But there's a lot of wisdom available in the many threads here, and it's all free. I invite you, and anyone really interested, to take a look at my Flickr photostream and work your way backwards. There's stuff on there that I'm absolutely embarrassed by, but I leave it there because it reminds me that I'm growing, and as I look at others' work I see that I've still got a long way to go. It's a journey. Find some like-minded folks in your area, join a camera club, and shoot, shoot, shoot. The best part is, digital film is free!!
I refuse chess with pieces that are not Staunton. But I did before. I had a friend that had married a woman who did clay work and she made him a huge chess set with figures that were all dressed and painted like in the 1400 in the french empire. It would be so confusing that we ended up not using this set. But his wife never could understand why...
