The digital camera revolution has developed a positive feedback loop. The technology has driven down prices which has induced more people to take up the hobby which in the past was viewed as expensive. The increased demand has allowed manufacturers to develop economies of scale and to lower prices even more. We truly live in the golden age of amateur photography. The bad news is that so many people have really great equiptment and are taking great pictures and posting them on the web that it's getting really hard to find or take a picture that is truly unique or even interesting. The eclipse and the transit brought this out. Thousands of pictures are out there to the point that the events look like Niagra Falls, or Yosemite Valley, or the South rim of the Grand Canyon. EVERYONE has a set of pictures of these places and well, they all look pretty much the same. To be unique you need to go to great lengths like this guy who went to the corner of Australia where he could get a picture of the transit that included a passing of the Hubble telescope. http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/venus_hst_transit.html Even astophotos of passing comets are no longer unique unless they have a Messier globular in the background and a passing of the ISS in the forground. We live in interesting times. DT