LOL MIchael, I think you just thanked Shadow for being expensive - I suspect you just mis-typed and left out an "i"... Vous etes, monsieur, effronte :) A good smile, Michael, thank you. (sorry about the missing accents). Shadow, not as easy as Ms. Terrible seems to think :) It's a digital darkroom without the chemicals and to do it right, take a bit of work.

I would caution you to think your project over very carefully. Go to any college or technical school and you will find a course which guarantees to make you a professional photographer, don't you believe it. First off, what is a professional photographer? Technically speaking it is one who derives their livelyhood through photography, but, (and here is the catch). What branch of photography are you going to work in? Press Photography (newspaper and TV) Sports Photography Wedding Photography Nature & Wildlife Photography Travel & Landscape Photography Fashion Photography Advertising Photography Commercial Photography Forensic Photography Industrial Photography Aerial Photography Under Water Photography, and the list goes on and on and on... In photoghraphy when one applies for a job a resume and a degree in photography might give you a leg up to get an interview, but in the real world, you would be hired from your portfolio. It is not enough to be able to take good pictures, you have to be able to show a portfolio of good pictures directly related to the interest of the respective employer, by example, if you are applying to the advertising department of an airline the last thing they want to see is your cute pictures of kids, dogs or flowers. Many people think it would be fun to be a staff photographer for a newspaper, but I can tell you first hand, that is just slightly more fun than getting a root canal. Keep in mind that they already have a full staff of photographers who they are familiar with. You can be sure those guys get the interesting news stories. As a Cub photographer you will get the mundane assignments like going to the local garden club and shooting pics of their annual award ceremonies, which may or may not get printed, depending upon how busy the news is that day. And even if you were fortunate enough to be on the "A Team" you will quickly learn that news photography is not what you think it is. One would think that you go to a news worthy event and document what is happening, but such is not the case. Before you leave the office the editor will tell you what is happening and what slant they want you to put on the story. Maybe they put you on the sports photography team. Well, you can forget getting a press pass to the super bowl. You will more likely be standing in the rain on the sidelines of your local high school football game. Do you have the right equipment? For press & sports photograpy you will need a profesional grade DSLR and a fair collection of lenses, however if you want to move up to Wedding, Portrait or fashion photography as a minimum you will need a medium format DSLR and the cheapest one of those that I have see lately is the Pentax 645d at a mere $10,000 for the body plus another $2,000+ for each lens. Fortunately for me, I have a Pentax 645 film camera and I can use my lenses on either the film or digital body. For high end fashion photography or landscape photography many magazines require you shoot 4x5 film negatives. In this case the cameras and lenses are readily available and if one is willing to use an older camera they are comparatively cheap, but finding a source for 4x5 film is becoming more and more difficult, and finding a processor is nearly impossible unless you live in New York or Chicago. I read recently that there is a big trend in home decorating to use large photo prints as wall hangings. With that in mind you might have some success in shooting photos and either selling them directly to a publisher or you could have them enlarged and sell them on commission through a gallery, but that is a very iffy way to make a living. Now if you want to shoot paparazi still, most insurance companies and many prominent lawers have freelance photographers on staff that follow ppl around trying to catch them working while they are pursuing a fraudulent disability insurance claim. Some of those photos can be quite lucrative, but keep in mind that for insurance claims or forensics most courts require you to shoot film and submit the negatives as evidence. (You may make digital prints from the negatives). Now if you would be willing to haul a portable studio around in a minivan from one Kmart to another and shoot pictures of children you could easily land a job in photography. Do I regret one moment of my 40 years experience in photography? Not on your life, but for most of that 40 years I have maintained another source of income which left me free to shoot what I want to and if ppl want to buy it fine, and if they don't like it, thats fine too, because I do it for my own enjoyment.

Hi Tom and welcome to the Photography forum. I have no personal experience with your camera so I opted to call up a copy of the owners manual to check some of the specifications, and I must say, for a point & shoot camera I was very impressed. I will try to take your questions in order and I am sure others will follow with even more information. Q: "Is it better to shoot the original at 10-14 mp and then reduce the pics, or shoot at 1 or 2 mp?" A:..Digital cameras record pictures by breaking them down into microfine dots of colored light, then recording the position of those dots. The term MP (mega pixels) is defining how many million dots per inch that is actually being recorded. In photography we refer to the quality of the detail as the "Resolution" of the picture. In a nutshell, the more MP that are recorded by your camera, the finer the detail it records. The question then becomes, how many MP do I need? The answer here depends upon what you intend to do with the pictures. If all you really desire are 4x5 or 4x6 full frame photos for the family album, then in most cases anything in the order of 4 to 6mp will suite your needs but, if you intend to go into post processing (editing and correcting on the computer) you will no doubt want to occassionally "crop" a photo, which means you cut a smaller section out of the photo and blow that up to full frame or you may occassionally have a photo that you want to blow up to 8 x 10, 11 x 14 or even poster size at 24 x 36. In order for your computer to expand the image it has to widen the dots and when we begin to seriously enlarge an image we begin to see a loss in image quality and often microfine white dots, which are defined in the electronics industry as "noise". Technically speaking the noise is generated when the dots are expanded too far and the camera or computer is left with open spaces between the dots, which it fills in with a white dot, but you need not know all that. Just suffice it to say that the larger the output you desire the more MP of information you need to give the computer to work with. Although nearly all cameras today are shooting in the 10 to 15MP range, even 6MP is sufficient to produce very good results for full frame images enlarged up to 8x10. Having said all of that, it also depends upon the physical size of the digital sensor that is in the camera. Obviously even if they are both rated at 12MP a 1/4" wide sensor in a cell phone cannot record as much data as a 2-1/2" sensor in a professional DSLR. Q:..Is it better to shoot the original at 10-14 mp and then reduce the pics, or shoot at 1 or 2 mp? A. I would always shoot the photo at the maximum resolution. In this manner you will have an archive photo that can be reduced for email or printed to a larger size. When I want to post a photo in a forum I pull the photo up in my editing program, reduce it, then hit "save as" and give it another file name or an extension on the file name, by example, when I reduce a photo for email I give add the word email to the file name and save that as a separate file. Q: Somebody told me there are different kinds of SD cards A. Basically there are two types of cards, SD cards and SDHC cards, which are high capacity cards. Tyically HD cards range from about 128kb to 2GB while the HD cards go up to 32GB and possibly more. I checked the specifications on your camera and the internal software will support using both SD & SDHC cards up to 32GB although I personally don't use any cards larger than 4GB. You can buy 2GB or 4GB cards on Ebay for about $5 to $7 with free S&H, whereas a 32GB card is in the order of $80. I just find it cheaper and more convenient to carry a couple spare 4GB cards, although in all honesty generally even one 4GB card is sufficient for most of my outings. By example, when shooting my Pentax K10d (10.2MP) if I shoot in RAW mode, which produces the highest resolution I can get up to 175 photos on one 4GB card or if I opt to set the camera on the highest resolution in JPEG mode I can get 804 frames on the same card. If I were to select the lowest resolution in JPEG mode I could get 2366 frames on one card. As you can see, if you were to get even one 4Gb SDHC card you could probably take your camera on a weeks vacation and never worry about running out of film, so to speak. If you do shoot a lot of photos I would stronly encourage you to get a couple extra rechargeabe batteries. They take up precious little space in the camera bag, but there is no worse feeling that being somewhere and just as your ready to shoot, the battery is dead. My camera will shoot over 700 frames on one battery, but I still never go in the field without two spares. Q...What's a good picture size to use for posting on forums like gardenweb? I use "Photoscape" to resize my photos for the web. The program is a free download from Google and in the editor mode it has a button marked "Resize". When you hit that button a window opens and you choose the width size you want. For the Web I generally hit the 900, which produces a photo at 900 x 598MP. (careful here, when you resize the photo be sure to use the "Save AS" and add an extension or give a new file name. This way it will not effect your archive photo. i sincerely hope this have offered you some help and I am sure others will soon add more info.

What I've been told is that the ink jet pictures will fade with time...don't think there is anything you can do about it. And...that the laser jet pics last much longer...most of us have ink jet printers. But..I am going to go ahead and use what pictures I want from my printer...when they are in an album, the light and air doesn't hit them, so they should (I feel) last as long as anyone concerned will want them...a chance we have to take if we are going to use them. I might buy a laser printer the next time...the cartridges are more expensive, but it might be worth the investment....