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And for the record: I take pretty pictures and have some downright extraordinary ones, but I know zero about actual techniques or equipment.
My camera is a Canon PowerShot A720 IS with 6x physical zoom (up to 24x digital but boy howdy quality sucks at that limit). I use two settings, the shutter speed for most things and the very nice macro for small things that won't run away. I borrowed one from a neighbor I like years ago and got my own as soon as I could afford it. It was a factory refurbish and I put 120,000-ish images (yay for OCD in small doses!) through it before it freaked out. I think the shutter's sticking open, but in a county with a population of 30K or so camera shops are few and far between. We tried ordering a set of fun polarizing lenses, which showed up 1/2" bigger around than the entire lens assembly and with no means of attachment even though I used the camera details as my search string, so I don't put any fancy lenses on my little Canon. They're tough, though...I'm on my second one, the one I originally borrowed, and it's performing just like its predecessor.
I have shot the ghost town of Coolidge, a silver-mining outpost 9,000 feet or so up in the Pioneer Mountains, and I have shot sunset standing on Rockaway Beach, Oregon. When we drove to Billings to see Alice Cooper with Rob Zombie (rocked and sucked, in that order, tix said NO PHOTO so I left the camera in the truck and oh yes I was severely annoyed when the security dude with the bullhorn said still photos would be allowed but the line was already moving) I got a shot of a meadowlark on a fencepost in about 110 degrees Fahrenheit. I've shot bald eagles from my own balcony with the same camera at -15 F.
I'm religious about using my lanyard because my hands like to randomly just say "NOPE" and snap open, but that doesn't mean it's never fallen off anything (It has. A lot.) I broke a bone in my hand when the lanyard swung the camera back around on me once as I was slipping on ice, that was fun. I have a legend-worthy capacity for ridiculous injury. Didn't break the camera, just my hand.
I don't use processing software because I suck so badly at tech & software...just so badly. I use IrfanView to resize & gamma correct if needed and (seriously) Paint to crop. That's why I put my images here--I figured to be high-quality, the images would need to be much sharper and cleaner than they come off the camera, plus editing software might be difficult as my computer has a teeny brain because I keep all my images on an external that holds a terabyte. My image count, midway through a heavy archive edit to remove duplicate scenes (same bird, same buildings, only need so many poses) and focus fails and the like, is just over 143,000 as of today (more yay for manageable OCD!) but I still don't know how to use Photoshop or work with a RAW file.
On a (slightly) serious note, I have many, many photos of different types of minerals, everything from exotics at shows to rare jaspers "in the wild" and ranging in size from things that will fit on the nail of my ring-size-2-1/2-pinkie to entire mountainsides. Anyone needs pictures of stones is welcome to contact me to find out if my work will suffice. I don't take money. Photography is not a business to me--it's the creative outlet I took up when that snapping-open trick and the fact that both of my pinkies and ring fingers are largely numb for no evident reason combined to make sculpting tiny animals in polymer clays impossible after 19 years at it. I'm okay with barter and great with "pay it forward", but I do not want money.
The stone I hope shows is either slate or shale, tan with huge dendritic markings that are likely iron oxide or manganese oxide. The posted version is 25% of the full-sized image, resampled but not cropped. It's from about 40 miles west of Missoula, right upside I-90 near a town called Alberton where there are spectacular outcrops of this stuff in tan, greens, purples, and even a whole mountainside of reddish-pink.
Time for me to quit clogging up your servers and attempt to be a responsible adult about my day, which is set to include an hour of horseback physical therapy and then just enough time to shower off the horsehair before I go ask my doc why he stopped renewing my pain meds out of freaking nowhere...
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