Loaded for bear

We leave tomorrow morning on our vacation/photo expedition to Colorado.
My wife and I each have a Nikon D100 digital SLR and an insatiable appetite for taking pictures. We also have a Nixvue Vista image tank, which is a portable 30-gigabyte hard drive that looks like one of those little pocket TVs that they sell at Radio Shack. It has a 2" monitor to display function menus and images and I've freed up 25 gigs of space, which will accommodate about 7,500 of our highest-resolution photos. That oughta see us through the week.
Back in the old days when we shot film, that would be the equivalent of nearly 210 36-exposure rolls. The processing cost, even if we just got negatives to scan and had no prints made, would be ruinous. With digital, we can shoot til our fingers bleed and not spend a cent, unless you count the minimal amount of electricity needed to keep the Nixvue and camera batteries charged, and we get that free from wherever we stay.
Digital photography is supremely liberating and, with the instant feedback, you know right away if you got the shot or what you need to do to make it better.
I love my Nikon F5 film camera - it makes such a satisfying chunkatachunka sound when I trip the shutter - but digital is supremely practical.
In case I haven't mentioned it, we have a stock photo business and market our photos through an agency called PAI Networks. You can visit their site at www.painetworks.com (the PAI stands for Photographers, Artists and Illustrators, rather than being part of a reference to pain). Do a search with the keywords "Amish" and "Indiana" and you'll see a whole bunch of our stuff - they're the pictures where you can actually see people's faces. One of my wife's brothers became Amish a couple of years ago and has no problem with his family being photographed, which gives us unique access to that scene.
Those are my photos of Janis Joplin, too.