I have been into photography for the last 50 years at least. Still have my 40 year old Nikon F2Sb bodies (two of them) with all the accessories and about 15 lenses. I currently shoot a D7100 and use many of the old lenses on a regular basis.
Learning to do time-lapse and Adobe LightRoom is one of the more powerful tools for selectively importing and tweaking images for output to a time-lapse application. Also really nice for general photo cataloging and HDR and Panorama (two other interests with focus stacking starting to gain traction).
At the same time, I have become aware of the LUA scripting language. It is used in two other applications that I use a lot and seems to be a really nice and powerful control language. Then, I find out that a good 40% of LightRoom is built with LUA.
What this all boils down to is that I can pick up a $30 gaming controller and use it to selectively pick and chose images in light-room without having to keep my fingers on the keyboard.
Going one step further, I can spend $300 on some MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) controllers and use these to actually adjust the images. The plus is that I already own units similar to these so the expense is non-existent. Video here:
LightRoom was $120 at Amazon, the interface software in the above demo is donation-ware ($20), the game controller = cheap and I already have the MIDI controllers.
This is a fun time to be alive!!!
