Orchid Borealis

  The last version of Adobe Lightroom (LR) with a perpetual license (i.e., not subscription-based) was version 6.14. On a Mac, installing LR 6.14 using the standard installer can only be done on macOS Mojave or earlier, as several components of the installer are 32-bit applications. While there are a few technical workarounds floating around to manually force an installation on pure 64-bit systems like macOS Catalina, they aren't flawless.   Furthermore, even if you install LR on Mojave and then upgrade your macOS in place, reports show it will only function semi-reliably up to macOS Monterey. On macOS Sonoma and newer, the application crashes immediately upon launch. Even on natively supported systems like Mojave, the Map module and automatic Face Tagging no longer work, and RAW files from cameras released after 2017 are not supported. After staying on Mojave to keep LR officially supported, I finally decided to migrate my entire library to digiKam. Here is the documenta...

Photography is about light and darkness, so you can get very different images from the same subject depending on how you set up the light.  I shouldn't say that lighting is the MOST important factor because finding an interesting subject and composition comes before the light.  In terms of the gear, appropriate, easy-to-control light sources can dramatically improve the images (or shorten the time required to get the images you want).  On the other hand, you might or might not get marginally better images by upgrading the camera body.  And they are usually much cheaper than a new camera body. I have been using two to three speedlights/flashes for most of plant photography.  They are tripped by inexpensive radio remote flash triggers.  Since I don't use TTL for this kind of photography, I just use old and cheap manual flashes. I frequently use a soft box or umbrellas as the light modifiers.  These modifiers make the light more diffused.  Wit...