Warren,
Thanks for the compliments. I too was very active with 35mm photography from the mid 70's thru the mid 80's although it was almost exclusively color slides. I was heavily involved in the medical imaging industry during the early days of the transition from film based x-rays to digital. We were using digital imaging in medicine many years before digital made to the consumer photography sector.
The best thing about digital photography is you can take lots of pictures for nothing which is my best advice for anyone with an interest in digital photography. Take as many pictures as you can and experiment with bracketing your exposures and try different lighting and backdrops. You can take 100 and delete 100 and the cost is ZERO. What a deal and you never know when you will come up with a neat picture. Although I like to play with some photo-shop processing tools I rarely use these tools for my pictures. All of the knife pictures I have posted have been 100% natural.
I took this picture almost 4 years ago in Las Vegas with a very inexpensive 3 Mega Pixel Kodak Point & Shoot camera with No Photo Shop adjustment, 100% natural and an example of a picture taken during the "Blue Hour"