Out here in the SF Bay Area it is a HUGE thing to take photos of your food. Except for the cheapest greasy spoons, I'm almost never in a restaurant where I don't see someone snapping photos with their cell phones. Since we go out a lot (3-4x/week) at all price levels, it is far from unusual. The more the meal costs, the more flashes are going off, every night. Taking food photos too often goes way beyond the "you two pose together so I can get a shot". People get up from their seats, walk around the table, not even noticing that they are in the way of the waitstaff. The tendency of most restaurateurs to cram in as many tables as possible doesn't help, either. Speaking as a customer, it is one thing to have a small cellphone flash go off. It is another thing entirely for someone to pull out a full-sized digital SLR and start taking flash pictures 2' away from you as you are trying to dine. Nothing like looking up at the wrong moment and getting a massive flash in your eyes as a stranger angles to get a shot of his 2" square of sea bass. Check the restaurant reviews on Yelp and you will find endless shots of food, often the same dishes, posted by various people. I have not yet seen the "stand on a chair" diner but I'm sure I will eventually! I don't mind low-key picture taking. I do it myself, and find it useful to see photos of food before deciding if I want to try a new place (of which there are thousands, where we live). But modern life shows us that there are too many people who go over the line and make it uncomfortable/unpleasant for others, and they simply don't care. If you as a restaurateur want to stop them, then you pretty much have to stop everyone from taking photos. When you get to the high-end restaurants, they don't usually have the same dishes anyway from week to week (sometimes day to day), so any photo is just a general representation of what the food will be like. In that case, a short slideshow on the restaurant's website more than suffices, and more restaurateurs should do that, IMHO.

I think the best way to go is to use generic holders and make the cards themselves customized to fit the Titanic theme. So, if you already have holders or want to buy some, find something elegant but simple that you can reuse. Then, you print off the luggage tags or boarding pass or whatever. That part is easy. You do all the art on the computer, then print on regular paper with a color printer and cut them out. I've done this sort of thing many times. You can use Word to do it. So, for the tags, you can buy some tan colored card stock, or just print on regular card stock. Then just draw in the shape of the tag, a dark brown ring on the left to simulate the reinforcemnt around the hole, and all the rest of the art on there - the star, the border, the lines to be filled out, etc. Once you have the art the way you like it, copy-paste it as many times as can fit on a page. Then print and cut. Use a hole puncher to punch the hole and attach the string. Admittedly this can be time consuming - it takes time to draw all this on the computer. But it's definitely not difficult and would be so cute.

I don't think I could help much, my daughter has the A95 but only uses P mode. Focussing on thorns would be "thorny", pardon the pun, plus you may be trying to shoot in the shade. The camera will likely backfocus on such a small subject, although they like something vertical so if you pick a straight stem you might be ok. Did you try the macro mode? Sometimes you need to use a tripod or other stabilization to avoid camera shake in that mode, but you can get closer. I usually shoot aperture priority, and would be hard put to lock focus on a thorn, and I have a good macro lens now. I would suggest the AV setting and dial in the aperture number. The higher the number, the smaller the lens opening. For flowers, using something in the range of f4 to f5.6 is usually pretty good. You have to experiment. If you want a deep depth of field with everything in the photo in focus, try f8, but then the camera might pick too slow a shutter speed, depending on light. To get a really shallow depth of field with good bokeh in the bg, try the largest lens opening your camera will allow (smallest number). Depending on what it is, you may not get everything you want in focus, like the whole blossom, face, etc. ISO on those p&s cameras will force a faster shutter speed, but then you run into noise problems. I would set the ISO to the smallest number your camera will allow in good light and not bump it up more than two notches. Offhand, I can't think of why your pictures are dark, but bumping the ISO up a little higher might help, not too much or you will get noise. I don't think you can bump it up past ISO 400 anyway, if that. Something else you can try, I think it works in P mode, is to bump up the exposure compensation. If you move it to the plus side, you will have to watch blown highlights. If you move it to the minus side, it might be underexposed/dark. You may have inadvertently reset some setting you shouldn't have in there or something could be wrong with your camera or metering. I would try restoring the camera to the default settings and start over. There should be some place in the menu for that. If you have an option for center point focus, I would use that, but use pattern or evaluative for metering (if you get a choice for that). If you can post a sample showing the exif info, that helps, but only certain programs and saves preserve that. The regular Canon forum on dpreview.com would be a good resource for you to achieve a higher skill level. That camera is capable of taking good photos with the proper skills and knowledge. If all else fails, you can try the flash. You can adjust that through the menu, too, look for FEC. Outside, I would start on the negative side, in -1/3 increments, not going below -1, (same with exposure compensation, don't go below -1 or above +1) because you don't want too much of a blast. It's called fill flash. On those cameras, in bright sunlight situations, you should always probably use about -2/3 to -1 exposure compensation or they will be overexposed and have blown highlights; otherwise, leave it at 0. Now Joe could have answered this with a lot fewer words :-). And I might not have thought of something.

Hi Karen, I did this for my daughters 2nd grade teacher. I had all the kids write a special note and drawing to her on a blank index card. I took pictures of each one of them individually. (We had to do this secretly when the kids were in the library) I used 81/2 x 11 size and put each page together with their picture and note. In the center of the book I did a 2 page spread of class trips and party pictures. On the first page I put a poem and had all the kids sign their names around it and on the last page I put a poem and picture of the class moms with there child. To fill in blank spots I put a certain cartoon character that she liked throughout the book. I used a binder with a plastic cover that you can insert a page and I put the teachers name and picture on it. It turned out really nice. Hope this helps! Have fun!