It’s also fantastic that you still find time to pursue photography. I haven’t had time to shoot anything not work-related.

A lot of DSLR owners seem more interested in the hardware than the art itself, so it’s nice to know that you’re still chugging along in a D200 while producing fantastic photos.

Keep it up!

Implosion: Yah a long way indeed, a lot of studying involved! Heh, esoteric but very relevant. It’s hard to say and I think it’s as much one way as it is the other..I’d say for a start you have to have some ‘eye’ when you start if not you’ll never take good pics, well good being pictures with soul. Anyone can learn the technical parts, but if you don’t have the ‘eye’ and the character to interact with your subjects, your pics will be sharp and clear but lifeless. I guess your technique tends to develop around your ‘eye’ as you may want to capture a certain scene, but can’t due to lack in skills…so you develop the skills which enable to you capture it as you wish. On top of that your skills refine your ‘eye’ in terms of composition, appreciating light and angle of light, appreciating rule of thirds, leading lines, vanishing point, depth of field and so on plus 100′s of other things you learn along the way (no horizontal lines through heads/necks in portraits, no vertical objects sticking out of heads, don’t light from directly below and so on). Does that answer you somehow, or was it a bunch of rambly nonsense?