To better pictures

Why another blog? At this point in my life I feel like I was able to awake things long forgotten from my days of running around with a camera in high school. A while back I was loaned a DSLR (canon rebel) by a friend to use during my sisters wedding. Afterwards I remembered that I really like photography. I had shot a lot in high school and early college, but then I met my wife, got married started a business, had three kids... So after getting better pictures than I thought I was going to get having not touched a camera in years I started looking into buying one myself. The first thing was deciding on canon or nikon. I know there are other makes out there and they are used by some fine photographers but most pros shoot one of those two and they have the most lens and other options. To keep a month or so of research and reading short what I came to was Nikon seemed to have the edge bang for the buck if you are going to spend less money. Canon has fine equipment on the high end with there L lens and Mark bodies but your looking at at least a grand a lens even used and the bodies start at 3 grand or more. To me it seemed Nikon offered better gear in my lower price range. So I bought a used D50 that had the 18-55mm kit lens. In the next few months I added lens and bodies and sold and traded etc... As of this writing I have two bodies. A D300 and a D200 both with the battery grips. On the wide side I have a Sigma 8mm fisheye and the Sigma 10-20mm. Zooms I have the Sigma 18-50mm F/2.8, Nikkor 18-200mm VR and 24-120mm VR, Sigma 70-200mm F/2.8 with a 2x teleconverter. In fixed lens I have a Nikon 50mm F/1.8 and a Sigma 500mm F/4.5. Lighting I have three Nikon SB-800 speedlights and some portable umbrellas.
I have yet to learn much of anything about how to use photoshop so most of what you see on my site (www.norling.smugmug.com) is right out the camera. As I learn more I want to pass it along. I plan on posting pictures and describing how I got that effect in camera. Why off the green box? Too many people leave their camera set on the little green box that is the automatic setting. If you do this you are not making uses of most of what your camera can do.