I happen to live in a part of NJ (the Highlands or Reading prong) that is laced with granite pegmatites. So I got hooked on collecting by finding some zircons literally in my own back yard. Subsequent exploration of the woods behind my house yielded nice fluorescent zircons as large as 3 cm as well as large (5+ cm) but very altered garnets. Building sites yielded large (10+ cm) blobs of allanite (XRD verified) and nicely fluorescent (and no doubt radon producing) uranium salts.
http://www.mindat.org/photoupload.php?id=181181http://www.mindat.org/photoupload.php?id=181182

It was just a matter of time before I discovered nearby Franklin and Sterling Hill. But I never found anything very good in the dumps and only a few good spinels and some decent chondrodite/norbergite xls in the limestone quarries. Collecting via the "silver pick" proved to be beyond my means at the time so I soon lost interest. Yes I know that folks keep finding interesting stuff on the Buckwheat dump even now - thorutite, petedunnite etc. But not me!
http://www.mindat.org/photoupload.php?id=166599http://www.mindat.org/photoupload.php?id=164225

That was in the mid 1970s.

I came back to collecting when Dick Hauck opened the Sterling Hill Mine Run dump (around 1992) where I found several good franklinite and willemite xls (up to 4-5 cm). But the easy pickings didn't last long.
http://www.mindat.org/photoupload.php?id=201121
http://www.mindat.org/photoupload.php?id=165250

So what to do? I tried Maine and had some luck finding a few nice apatites but the "yield" didn't seem worth the travel time and almost everything is closed to collectors anyway.
http://www.mindat.org/photoupload.php?id=196281http://www.mindat.org/photoupload.php?id=196283

Then I chanced on some photos of Mont Saint-Hilaire specimens in one of the mineral encyclopedias. Bingo! I had found my true love.
http://www.mindat.org/photoupload.php?id=163594http://www.mindat.org/photoupload.php?id=170698

While I still have some FSH stuff, I am now almost exclusively a collector of MSH and nearby Saint-Amable (aka STA or Varennes).
http://www.mindat.org/photoupload.php?id=164512

I have my own little STA web site (mostly just photos) at

http://mysite.verizon.net/vzey5wva/alkaliseltzer/

and Alkali-Nuts has been kind enough to display some of my MSH photos.

Some leftovers from an unfocused "whatever is pretty" collecting phase in the 1990s rattle around in a couple of boxes ...
http://www.mindat.org/photoupload.php?id=196987

I use the prehistoric Russian MBS-10 scope which is OK for viewing but which has really awful chromatic abberation (especially at high power). In addition I struggled for years with the "photo attachment from hell" that I got for the scope. Not only did the photo tube optics distort, they also added a horrible green-to-pink cast on all photos. Only some hand made filters and heavy use of Adobe Photoshop made my early photos tolerable.

I now shoot through the eye tube (using a Canon XTi) and use Helicon multi focus SW. The latter is a wonderful tool but the early versions tended to produce "ghosting" around edges. Recent versions are much better but still have artifacts. And I still have the chromatic abberation. Photoshop is the only way out and I rely heavily on it (along with a few other digital trickery tools).

I still suffer from my "fiber optic from hell" which makes it hard to avoid blown highlight but I'm getting better at dealing with that.

Note 1: To protect their privacy, I try to avoid using people's names in my photos. However there are three people who have contributed greatly to my collection and have also agreed that it's OK to mention their names (on my home page at least). If you see "JPB" that's Jean-Pierre Beckerich from whom I got many of my most interesting MSH specimens. If you see "RT" that's Ralph Thomas from whom I got many interesting MSH and Franklin specimens. And if you see "TS" that's Tony Steede who has been extremely generous not only with MSH rarities but also with a lot of EDS work. There are several analysts (AMcD, RG, MB, PP in particular) who deserve my thanks. But I don't want to spell out their names. People who need to know will know!

Note 2: If you have problems fusing my stereo shots, try standing back from the monitor. If that does not help, try downloading the images and using a smaller view (or just use the zoom control on your browser). If that still doesn't work, try cutting the photo into R and L halves. If you use a fast viewer to flip back and forth between the images the specimen will seem to rotate and thus provide somewhat of a 3D feel. You can also try to print the L and R images and use some sort of viewer (e.g. the type used for aerial topo maps). But these are not full resolution photos and may not print very well. (I haven't tried this last method.)

Some people find it easier to fuse "walleye" stereo. You can try this by opening two browser windows with the same image. Arrange the windows so that only the "right" images is visible on the left side of the screen and only the "left" image is visible on the right side of the screen. It may be easier to download the image first and then to bring it up in two instances of a viewer such as Irfanview. That will also let you easily reduce the size of the images which may help in fusing.

I don't have a calibrated set up for creating the stereo shots. Hence the stereo effect may be exaggerated in some cases. My view is that stereo is useful for de-cluttering the backround and clarifying crystal shapes. If my photos do that, I'm happy. Life is too short. Humans take note: "reality" cares not a whit about the spacing of homo sapien eyes!

Note 3: Most of the MSH rarity information in my captions is derived from the tables published by Horvath et al in the July/August 2000 issues of Lapis and Rivista. I don't want to sound like a broken record in the captions so this note serves as a general acknowledgment.

Updates and corrections:

June 2008: Photo http://www.mindat.org/photo-168270.html was briefly posted as UK114 of MSH (Na kupletskite). However the original Uk114 is very different and without further analysis it is impossible to say if this is Uk114 (probably not), some other new kupletskite or just a "bald spot" in regular kupletskite (the most likely explanation).

August 8 2008: Photo http://www.mindat.org/photo-172533.html originally posted as elpidite on account of the UV response has now been confirmed as gotzenite (as per the label)!

Photo http://www.mindat.org/photo-173404.html has now been conformed as hisingerite. The green "fur" is ferroceladonite.

June 2009: After recent cataract I now see that many of my photos have been over-sharpened, over-contrasted and over-saturated. Many are also excessively blue. All these problems result from my attempts to make the specimens look the way I remembered them. At this point I should really go back and re-process many of the photos starting from the original images. But I'm burned out with photos just now so it will have to wait. In the mean time - caveat emptor.