Nice work!
My favorite carpin' setup is thus:
7' or 7'6" ultra light spinning rod, 4lb main line. A large corkie - prefer a high visibility color like cerise, or the green/orange half & half. This is slipped on the line and pegged with a half a tooth pick (the round, pointed style vs. the flat style) about 4-6 feet from a #6 egg hook - prefer Gamakatsu or Owner hooks for this, as they're durable and sharp. The egg hook is tied on with a normal improved clinch knot on my setup - since I'm not fishing eggs or yarn with this rig. I fish water from 1-4 feet deep with this rig. Note there is no weight mentioned - I don't use any when carping. Carp are very sensitive fish, and they can tell instantly if there's resistance on the line in the form of weight, or too much tension on the line, and they can spit a bait faster than you can blink. The bait I use is enough weight to sink down to the fish's level.
For bait, most of the time I stick to good ol' sandwhich bread - wheat or multi-grain usually. In my experience, the fish will hit this bait more often than plain white bread. I look for the stuff on the clearance rack at Albertsons or Fred Meyer. When baiting up, simply tear a piece off, preferably with a small section of crust, hook the hook through the crust, and then just keep pressing the bread into kind of a pyramid or ball shape around the hook, and keep pressing until you've got a dense, firm bread ball on the hook. You don't need to cast far in most carp-fishing, so I stick to 30' or shorter casts. Keep some slack in the line - the corkie serves as an excellent strike indicator. When a fish mouths the bait and starts to swim off with it, the corkie will twitch, or start moving. Count to three in your head and set the hook firmly, but don't get toooo crazy - think of it as setting the hook on a flyrod, vs sinking a hook into the mouth of a salmon. Carp don't have hard mouths, so a wild hookset is unnecessary anyway. Keep the drag set to about 2 or 2.5lbs at most - let the fish take line, and pump & crank it back in. These are very hardy fish, and it doesn't hurt them like it would say, a trout, to play them longer.
When bread doesn't work, I'll fish canned sweet corn, firm balls of dough mainly made up of creamy peanutbutter and wheat flour, or lastly, night crawlers.
Bread is my #1 producer. Corn usually gets more squawfish, and occasionally trout if they share the water with carp. I have caught stocker trout in Commonwealth and Bethany on my bread baited carp rigs too - though not too often.
If you want to add a bit more to the fun of playing the fish - use the same basic setup, but on a 5 or 6 weight flyrod. Just peg the corkie on the leader like you would the mainline on the spinning outfit, and use a wide looped overhand or lob cast. You can also forgo the corkie, and watch the tip of the flyline as your strike indicator, if you keep your leader short (7' or less) - but the corkie is better. Nothing like having a carp take out 100' of flyline and then take you well into the backing in about ten or fifteen seconds.
When i fish for carp, I look for signs of actively feeding fish - instead of just blind fishing over dead water. It's kind of like hunting in that aspect. Just look for silt plumes or trails, or bubble trails, if you don't actually see the fish themselves. Sometimes in shallow water, they will tail like a bonefish - that's quite a sight to see too!