Start practicing your skills on cheap kits. You can learn from your mistakes on a $10 kit just as well as on a $50 kit. Save the expensive stuff for when you know what you're doing. (Unless you're rich of course, in which case...nevermind.)
Thanks for asking NFN. I really can't get started on this till after Christmas - too much going on at the moment. I need big chunks of time - it's just too frustrating to work on a project for an hour or two, then have to put it away for a week.
Actually, the "speed of dark" is not a bad term at all. In Alcubierre's equations describing a warp bubble, dark (or negative) energy is required to warp the space around a ship, creating the bubble. Unfortunately, we have no idea how to create such negative energy with current technologies.
Yeah I wasn't throwing cold water on the idea that there are ghosts - just commenting on the nature of the evidence. In my case, I would need a personal experience to convince me - an experience in real life that demonstrated the existence of a ghost. Until I have such an experience, I can't...
Whether you believe in ghosts or not, photographs aren't evidence in any way shape or form. Pics have always been suspect in the past, but in the era of Photoshop they are utterly inadmissible.