Hi and welcome to the forum! FFO means first flower out (first to bloom in the season). I am so sorry to hear of your losses. If you will send me an e-mail, I will send you a long and very detailed reply regarding seed-starting and ways to mark your crosses, as well as how to protect your seedlings. My e-mail address is posted here if you click on my name. Nancy

Are we going to have assignments like we used to with alphabet A to Z . That was fun...

We used to have assignments [at Karen's time] starting with some letter in the alphabet...all I remember the last letter was C, when I posted Cattles. Anybody likes to carry on? Konrad

Ok, Kate there are several thing that play into this, but they all concern light and the amount of light that enters the sensor. Fortunately your camera allows for full manual operations. These are very basic expinations, but they should help you, If I dont expand on an area too much it is because there is a lot involved in it. You have these selections on you circular dial on the top of the camera ***Tv - Shutter Priority, this allow you to control the amount of time that shutter is open. It will adjust the Aperture accordingly to have the best Exposure Value (EV) ***Av - Aperture, ultimately it controls the Depth of Focus(DoF) for the camera. There are blades inside the lens. The lower the number the more open the blades are, shallow depth of focus. Higher the number the more closed they are, longer depth of focus. ----F/2.8----- ----F/16---- ***M - Manual, you control shutter speed and aperture at the same time. ***ISO -pg84 -this is considered the speed of the film, back in the day of course. now it is the sensitivity of light that the sensor allows. The higher the ISO the more sensitive to light it will be. However, the higher the ISO the more noise you have in the picture. P&S are notorious for this. ***Turn off the flash - it on pg42 of your manual. There is a large round button on the back of the camera and it has four ways you can push it. Push the top area will adjust the flash. Push it until you see a lightening bolt with a circle and a line through it, like the 'no smoking' signs. My Suggestion: 1)Put camera on Tv. --adjust to 1" 2)Turn off the flash 3)Put on ISO200 4)Change the drive to to 2 second timer, this way the camera shake wont effect the picture when you hit the shutter release. This should do the trick, play with the ISO and the sutter speeds to until you have you desired affect. If you have some noise in your picture, dont worry I can help you out that with wome noise reduction software. We'll touch on that later though