Thank you all for the comments. Glad your enjoying the pics. I'd rather see blooms than the white stuff on the ground. COTTAGE CANDY is a keeper. VICTORIAN LACE survived but its bloom is butt ugly and doesn't even look like VL. It tried to open yesterday and seems to be hung up. I went back here on the forum and looked at posters photos and sure doesn't have the same coloring. I'm not sure if its a weather thing or the wrong plant. Time will tell. Kathy: Yes, the picture quality is just as good inside as out. I use a Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT with a telephoto lens that has IS. I haven't ever taken the lens off and put back the original lens back on since I started using it. I think I will try it just to see what the difference in picture quality would be outside. I love this camera even if it is heavier than the Canon Powershot SD800 IS, which I also have. Vickie: I reset the camera so that if the CF card is not in the camera it will display a message. But you are right...I did get to go back out and visit the garden again ;-). As a tip, if you want to know what camera someone is using for their pictures,settings, etc, you can click on the photo and typically it will take you to the posters album photo in whatever web hosting site they are using. You will see on the right side "Photo Info" which you click on the little arrow next to it (Photobucket) or it will open with all the Photo Info listed (Picasa). Also know that if you haven't marked your albums as "Private" anyone can access all your photo albums, if that matters to you. Julia

Got up at 5:30, darn race didn't start until 8, they said 7 on one of the news websites. Had to get there early enough so I didn't have to park too far away, people everywhere all over town. Hot already but not as bad as I thought. Here I am telling you what to do and my photos did not turn out too great. I shot sports mode, buildings & background were bright but runners too dark, many blurry or out of focus, many good and fixable. I am going to have to process each one that's worth keeping (shot 594) and brighten most of them up with shadow highlights. Good learning experience. I shot most in sports mode which kicks into burst, but I'm not happy with a lot of today's because I can't change any of the parameters in that, picks too large apertures and too slow shutter speeds and continuous auto focus I'm not used to at all. It is hard shooting a sea of people, never been in a situation quite like that before. I'm thinking about what to do next time, couldn't figure out how set burst so I could use tv mode standing out there with all those people, should have shot tv mode, 1/800, ISO 800, partial metering. Maybe. I'll have to get some help with that. Coming home, I was trapped in by lots of street closings, had to go way out of my way to find a way out of that maze, lucky I know my streets around here, only one way out from where I got myself. Filled two 1 gig flash cards in about 1/2 hour! Good timing though, a few stragglers were coming up the hill when both cards were full. I'll wait for your photos. Yours will be easy. I know people steal photos. I haven't caught anybody doing that to me yet, maybe mine aren't that good? Somebody in France liked my peacock java applet and wrote and asked, I said ok. What do I care? I just don't want people making money off my work. Will address some of the other issues later. Too bad you have to break up your lily garden, that would be very hard for me to do. You must be either a specialist or have special lilies and maybe getting older like I am? Granny out shooting a race. Hah! I wonder which lens would be best for that? Used 50mm with a different race, much smaller, this time went with the 28-135 so I could zoom. 70-200 not wide enough even if I had it which I don't. That is a conundrum for sure since I was so close to most of them standing on the sidewalk, brushed by a few, tried not to get in their way. Then some other photog gets in my way. There now you taught me something about bracketing. I've been doing it the hard way. Shoot, look at histogram, set exposure comp or some other adjustment. I'm going to try bracketing and quit on the bright end like you do. So thanks for that tip! I dared not shoot that race in AV (my favorite) because with the early morning bright light and shadows, it would have picked too slow a shutter speed. Frustrating. THIS is where I would like to have been positioned lol. She hadn't turned her camera toward the race yet, she had to swing it about 45 degrees to her right to be pointing at the runners coming up the long hill. I fixed this one a little. Later, Alice

For an 8mp camera, I finally got a 2gb card and shoot RAW, you don't need quite as large a card for JPG. Still, at events, I sometimes do shoot in JPG and was filling a 1gb card in 1/2 hour, the 2gb card filled up in about an hour doing some street shots and a parade in RAW. It's best to set the camera to the finest quality possible unless they are shots where you need a whole lot but the quality isn't critical. You can't ever get lost quality back on your important shots. Then there are the bigger cards. The reason I don't want to get into larger sizes is that if the card gets corrupted, you lose more photos, plus they are a lot more expensive. I have had good luck with my Kingston cards which were cheap and slower, now I have one Sandisk Ultra II, both seem to be pretty reliable. There was trouble with some brands. Those things are so tiny, it would be so easy to lose the extra ones. I need a better plan to try to avoid that. Be sure to order the right card for the cam. They either take CompactFlash or SD (or proprietary memory sticks), and it would be easy to make a mistake on that.

OK, I'll try an explain my thinking... 1.look at your environment and decide what you want to shoot. Since it just finished raining thought take some macro of water on various plants, used the ef-s 60 due to it lightweight for hand held close-ups. Next I look at lighting, low clouds but not too dark so I didn't need to use a flash, I can use settings to manipulate lighting. 2.Determine camera settings to archive the look you want. Take a few test shots at various white balance, shutter speeds, aperture, iso settings to get an idea how the end result will be. Used manual so I could adjust as light situations changed. Also change focus points depending on composition. 3.Take some photos Lighting is everything, watch how the shadows effect the look your after. Direction of light source, your position and so on. Doing this type of photography your able to take multiple shots at various angles to get the looks your after. The thing that I watch the most after camera settings is background objects and color. Find the subject, figure out your aperture/shutter speed, compose your shot, select focus point, check background. I don't want something behind the subject to draw your eye away from the focal point, aperture comes into play here. The bigger the f stop (smaller number) the more the bokeh( background out of focus) you achieve. I took 100 photos to get the 9 that were most appealing, out of those there are 4 that are my faves. f5.6, 1/50s, 800iso f5.6, 1/50s, 800iso Used ef 17-40 f4, settings f8, 1/100s, 800iso