Some help regarding a Digital Camera
 

Hi Everyone, This forum gets a lot of responses so I'm calling on your wonderful knowledge and experience . . .

I have just ventured into the world of digital photography and purchased myself a very nice camera, but having been a manual SLR user for many years I'm finding the whole thing daunting.

My questions are the following: -
What size memory stick(s) do you travel with? It has a 32mb memory that came with it but this only holds about 26 standard photos, now I snapped away last weekend but only ended up saving about 6 photos which I downloaded onto my computer but I know I'd be saving many, many more when travelling.

How do you save your photos when you are away? Assuming I use all my memory sticks where do I download my photos to? I know that many sites such as yahoo groups etc have areas that you can download photos to but is this easy enough to do while on holiday (assuming I don't want to travel with my laptop and will be using internet cafes).

Once you've downloaded your photos to computer (hard-drive or internet site) do you burn a copy to CD-Rom or do you print out wanted photos on a printer? My old laptop doesn't have a burner in it and I'm a bit loathe to fork out another few hundred for an external burner?

I'm assuming that down the track the fact that I will no longer have to purchase film or actually pay for developing (except for those photos I really want), that the camera will pay for itself but at the moment it's all becoming quite expensive now that I'm confronted with the prospect of having to buy a burner, more memory, a printer etc.

Apart from that loving the experience of digital.

Thanks everyone in advance.
My cameral is a 5 mega-pixel, 3 x optical zoom but I am using it at the 3 mega-pixel and standard rather than fine setting which I am finding quite acceptable (and uses less battery/memory). What about you guys - do you find that this is ok or should I be using the higher (ie. 5 mpx and fine settings)?

Unless you are bringing along your own laptop with CD burner, I wouldn't rely on having easy access to computer resources abroad to download and burn CDs.

Camera memory cards are relatively inexpensive. I recently traveled with 512 MB of camera memory (450 pictures).

I find that taking pictures at 3MP are great for computer based photo albums and prints up to 5x7. I would only use the 5 MP setting if you intend to print 8X10 or larger.

What you will need is a reliable battery charger with dual voltage input (for european voltages) and converter plugs. There are several threads on this site dealing with this issue.

I hope that this helps. Remember that while your trip will end quickly, your pictures will last forever.

What is the end use of your photos? This is critical info for advising you on whether you should be shooting at a higher format. (Professionals shoot in raw format for the maximum amount of data capture.)

My Olympus 8080 came with a 32mb xD card, but I use a 1 gig compact flash card which will hold more photos than I am ever likely to take at one time.

The size of memory you will need is directly related to how high a format you are shooting at, since the higher the format, the more room each photo will require.

All major cities will have photo labs that can burn a CD of your photos for a small fee. (Although, from a cost savings standpoint, it's as much as getting a roll of film developed.) Theoretically you can then erase your memory stick and reuse it. However, if you have any problem with the CD when you get home, you will be out of luck. It's largely a matter of how paranoid (or careful) you want to be.

My own plan is to have my tiny notebook computer with me, so I can upload the photos from my camera, view and store them on the computer, and also burn a safety CD (CD burner is built in).

I'm not sure what the usual policy is at internet cafes about uploading your photos to a website where you could store them. But within the next few years, as more and more people go digital, I'm sure we will see all sorts of options for solving these problems.

We no longer print all the photos we take on holiday - gets expensive and takes up room.
We just got a program called ProShow Gold (there are other similar ones) which we'll now use to make DVDs of our trips. We get music from the place we've visited and set the photos to that; the program is really easy to use and it puts movement on the pictures, titles, dissolves between them, etc...whatever you want. Then we can watch them (and listen) on the TV - much easier when looking at them with groups of friends or family.

The other day I was kind of down, the weather was nasty and I was lonely because my DH was out of town. I put on the DVD of our holiday in Greece and was instantly transported back - the sun, the views, the music... so wonderful.

I use this when I travel, it's a portable burner:

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_...eno_cp200.html

You only need to travel with 1 memory stick (say 256 MB or 512) and blank cds and a converter. No need for a laptop.

Every day I would just come back and burn my pics, and empty out the card for the next day.

I have just ventured into the world of digital photography and purchased myself a very nice camera, but having been a manual SLR user for many years I'm finding the whole thing daunting.


Use the search function and you will find a ton of information is already here.

My questions are the following: -
What size memory stick(s) do you travel with? It has a 32mb memory that came with it but this only holds about 26 standard photos, now I snapped away last weekend but only ended up saving about 6 photos which I downloaded onto my computer but I know I'd be saving many, many more when travelling.

How do you save your photos when you are away? Assuming I use all my memory sticks where do I download my photos to? I know that many sites such as yahoo groups etc have areas that you can download photos to but is this easy enough to do while on holiday (assuming I don't want to travel with my laptop and will be using internet cafes).


Some say buy more memory; some say burn cds; some say get a device such as a laptop, mp3 player, or digital wallet. Loading your pictures onto the internet is usually not a viable option, as it takes up a lot of bandwidth and time, and to get sufficient storage capacity at a web site you will have to pay. There are arguments for and against each of these options, as you will find in the results of your search.


Once you've downloaded your photos to computer (hard-drive or internet site) do you burn a copy to CD-Rom or do you print out wanted photos on a printer? My old laptop doesn't have a burner in it and I'm a bit loathe to fork out another few hundred for an external burner?


You aren't going to be hauling a printer along, are you? Assuming that you are talking about printing out selected pictures after you return home, I would suggest you have a photoshop, or one of the online services do it. I know that some home printers do a fairly good job, but to get good prints you need not only a good printer, but special paper. I keep all my pictures on one of my hard drives, backed up to another, but only print those special shots that I want to put into a book. The rest are better viewed on my monitor; or on a website if I want to share them.


I'm assuming that down the track the fact that I will no longer have to purchase film or actually pay for developing (except for those photos I really want), that the camera will pay for itself but at the moment it's all becoming quite expensive now that I'm confronted with the prospect of having to buy a burner, more memory, a printer etc.

Apart from that loving the experience of digital.

Thanks everyone in advance.
My cameral is a 5 mega-pixel, 3 x optical zoom but I am using it at the 3 mega-pixel and standard rather than fine setting which I am finding quite acceptable (and uses less battery/memory). What about you guys - do you find that this is ok or should I be using the higher (ie. 5 mpx and fine settings)?


The degraded settings you are using are probably good for snap-shot quality pictures, but not good enough for pictures that you want a large print of. The problem is you don't know which is that picture until after you've taken it. One drawback of digital cameras is that its hard to evaluate the quality of photos on the tiny screen. I suggest you use all of the capacity you have bought, after you have solved the memory/storage situation. I know also that since going digital I take far more pictures, even some of signs so I will know which church I was at for the picture, but I have enough storage to do that. I had anticipated that exhausted batteries would be a problem, so I bought a spare, but I have never needed it (my camera powers down when I am not actively shooting) and I only use it once in a while to run it down and recharge it.

As you have a laptop, you could use that for storage, but if you don't want to take it along, you will definitely need some way to offload pictures. I have an mp3 player that keeps me amused on the long plane ride, and has enough storage for all the pictures I could take. I prefer not to get cds burned while touring, as it takes time, and I don't want to have to haul a bunch of cds, nor risk breaking one. When you shell out the money to solve the storage problem, just think of it as money you will save from not buying and developing film!

Thanks everyone for your help. I knew this would be where I'd find good stuff!! I've had an Mp3 player suggested to me before and considering I can get more use out of it than just saving photos this may be the way to go.
The technology revolution is leaving me behind I'm sad to say - so I'll just ask one more question. When I download my photos to an Mp3 player is it an easy enough process to then upload them from the Mp3 player to my laptop?

Thanks.

Danielle, you'll receive perhaps fewer and slower replies, but you do have a great resource of online info at www.dpreview.com in their "forum" section of the website.

You can use the "search" function there to locate almost anything you need to know about cameras. There are some "experts" who post with regularity there. The online glossary and the tutorials are helpful for a new digital user, as well.

Digital Photography Review online.

just buy more memory...much easier. on vacation time is precious and you don't want to worry about what photos you've taken. and plus, unless you're viewing them properly it's impossible to tell what you've got on the lcd display. some of my best photos appeared to be duds on the lcd...

Buy extra memory. In your position I'd take at least 2 x 512Mb cards, and take pictures at the highest quality setting. You can get pictures downloaded to CD if need be. I'd take extra memory cards so that you're not left without a camera in the unlikely event that one is corrupted. I wouldn't use a laptop or CD burner because of the weight.

"...in the unlikely event that one is corrupted."
Are we still talking about the same thing?

First off, the size you are shooting at should be fine for most things. I also have a 5mp camera but shoot at resolutions that produce images of between 1 and 2 mp. It's easy enough to change the resolution on the spot when you are shooting a scene you really like and think you might want to blow up (printed). However, even at 1mp I have many beautiful 8x10s printed. Have even got some nice 11x14s. And as time goes on you'll probably print less than you originally think. Showing your photos on the computer (or TV if you have a DVD player) is much more fun than passing around a photo album.

Regarding how to save images when traveling. For the past four years I've used a "digital wallet" which is a tiny harddrive. Available from "Minds at Work" (google it). There are other similair products by other companies - in all cases you download your memory card to it and then transfer to computer when you get home. But they cost about $300 (they do hold 20-40gig). But now that memory cards have come down so much in price I'm not sure it's worth it to have a separate memory source. I would get at least one 512mb card. You are right that it will seem expensive at the begining but they last forever and after a few trips the savings on film and developing will really pay for it.

You can have a CD burned at any internet cafe in any city in Europe. Last summer they seemed to range from 5-10€ each. But they hold 700mb of data and the price is the same whether your memory card is a 32mb or a 512mb. Another reason to get the 512. The poster who said having a CD burned will cost as much as having film develped was right only if you are using a 32mb card. Think how much you'll save if you only have to burn a CD after shooting 512mb worth of images. And since you don't have a CD burner at home this makes the most sense. Then you'll have the CD with permanent storage and you can just pop it in your computer to edit, view, etc.

I personally don't edit my stuff while traveling. I save almost everything I shoot. You'd be surprised how much better (or worse) something looks on a real computer screen than on the camera's tiny screen. I average about 1000 shots a week when traveling. If you can afford it make the investment for memory cards now, you'll be glad you did when next year you find you spend almost nothing. You will love digital photography. My old Nikon SLR is all dusty and lonely in the closet as I never use it any more.

1,000 a week. That's a picture every 10 minutes day and night !

I guess it depends on what you think your time abroad is worth. I travel to enjoy the sights and sounds and people and food, not to spend my time looking for a place where I can spend my limited time copying camera memory to disks, and verifying the results.

Figure out how much memory you'll need for the number of pictures you anticipate taking, buy enough chips to hold them, and get on with it. Watch edealinfo.com for bargains.

Hi Daneille

As others have written. what is the purpose of your photos? If you plan on enlarging past 8 by 10 the 3 MP setting may not be enough. (i have had excellent results with the Fuji though, blew up 11 by 15 on a 2 MP camera.

Size of memory stick- depends on the length of your trip. For a two week trip I took a 512 and 256 stick. If you use the review function in your camera to delete photos you dont really like a stick of 512 should be enough.

Where do i save to? Nothing special really, though i have seen a larger number of places that will copy the pictures on your memory stick to a CD. good as backup and not terribly expensive. (7 euro in Italy a few weeks ago)

printing- you can print directly from a number of new printers,many seem to make how old or new the computer is almost irrelevant. just stick the memory into the slow in the printer and follow the prompts...this might be a bit more difficult if you have a lot of pictures and only want to print a few.

You will find, realistically, that the digital camera will pay for itself after one of two vacations where you take a lot of good pictures. Buena suerte

Getting back to the OP question: always shoot at the highest resolution your camera is capable of, and figure out how much memory you will need on that basis.

Why? Because you might take a picture of a scene that you will later want to crop down to a fraction of its original size, and the more pixels that cropped image has in it, the better the print will look. For example, if you take a 5mp image and crop out half of its height and width, the resulting image will contain 1.25mp. However, if the original image is 3mp, the half-sized image will only have .75mp, which you can practically <i>count</i> in an enlargement of any useful size.

I debated flash cards vs microdrives and chose a IBM microdrive for my 4 MP Canon G3 (it doesn't use memory sticks and only came with a 32mb flash card....which I've never used at all). The microdrive is more useful for me than flash cards since it plugs right into my Apple Powerbook and could be used as a secondary drive...not that I've ever done that...but I could (it won't take a flash card). At a mid-level resolution, it holds more pictures than you could ever take on a trip. (I took about 2000 last year on a 3.5 wk trip to Italy...and just returned from a 9 day trip to Paris where I took about 450 pics.) And printing them out at 8.5 x 11 doesn't reveal any image degradation.

I would periodically review pics and delete the obvious throw-aways during the trips...but even if I didn't, running out of capacity was never a concern.

A bigger concern is getting the right power converter/adapter &amp; plugs for whatever country you're going to....assuming your camera doesn't use disposable batteries. (And they present a problem as well. Deb's Blackberry failed and, apparently, a AAA battery in Europe is different than here; it didn't work with new ones bought in Paris...but worked fine with new ones bought here. go figure.)

I think downloading to a computer or the internet and/or burning a cd during a trip would be a big hassel and a big waste of time.

My 1st trip more than paid for the camera + microdrive + 2nd battery as compared to what film and processing would have cost.

The biggest effort you'll make is editing all the pics you shoot. I now have 6 GB of pics...and they're accumulating faster than I can edit them. :(

Daneille,

Regarding the mp3 player. First, not all of them have the capacity to hold pictures, so you would have to check on that. Mine has a 20GB hard drive, which is plenty to hold music and pictures; it also does movies, but I've never tried that.

Transferring from the camera to the mp3 player usually requires some sort of interface (not all cameras use the same type of memory). Transferring from the mp3 player to the computer requires some way to hook them together; mine uses a usb cable, so you would have to check your computer and the mp3 player for compatibility.

Incidentally, the mp3 player with a noise cancelling headphone makes a long flight almost tolerable.

I would also add that shooting at max resolution is the only way to go... as has been mentioned you never know which picture you'll want to crop and/or blow-up on print. Depending on how many megabytes of data you produce during a set vacation time dictates which solution is best. The MP3 player with storage for pictures is generally a good idea if you want/need an MP3 player also, otherwise 2-3 large memory cards will usually do the trick. If you expect to use your laptop for anything else than downloading pictures bringing that one solves the problem, but if not again it's too heavy. I would at least make sure when you return that you have 2 physical copies of the pictures i.e. on 2 physicly seperated harddisks, on a CD or DVD and a harddrive etc. If you are feeling very paranoid make sure you've got that during your travels as well. In that case a laptop or storage device/mp3 player is a good idea for backup.

Sindre

I use a 5 mp camera and shoot most pics on a fine or very fine setting( it's not the highest/tiff)

I just got back Venice canal scene that I had enlarged to 16x20 by an online processor.

I had never enlarged a digital photo that size before and was shocked to see how great it came out. It is extremeely clear and as good as a 35mm.

Now if only I could seel all of the extra rolls or 35mm film

After years of taking digital pics and not printing them out for whatever reason (usually because it's so time consuming to print a lot of pics!), I now have them printed professionally. Almost all the drug stores, discount stores and camera shops will print up your pics from just about any media (CD, memory stick, etc...)

I use Sam's Club - they are the cheapest I've found so far - $0.18 for a 4x6 print. You can upload your pics to their website and order the prints you want. Then you can have them sent to you or pick them up at a Sam's Club near you and save the shipping charge.

It's so much easier than messing with printing them on your inkjet printer. You have quality prints that will last in just a few days.

more importantly, carries the extra batteries...nothing worse then running out of juice.

I came back from a recent vacation to find two of my memory cards corrupted. I was able to use a recovery program, but it convinced me to buy smaller memory cards, not one megasize one. That way if one card is corrupted I am not chancing losing the bulk of my photos. Those photos get me away from my daily grind after I have returned and are very important to me. You will love using a digital! No constrictions on how many you take because of &quot;cost&quot; of printing. I shoot and shoot and then make my final decisions when I get home. Part of the fun now of a vacation is reliving it while working on those photographs.

Just a clarification....
digital storage (ie memory sticks,secure digital, compact flash, etc) are perfectly safe going through airport security equipment or do you ask to have it hand inspected?

they're safe. this has been covered several times here.

Thanks again to everyone for indulging me with these questions that have been asked dozens of times before.
I think I'll go for several smaller memory cards and then worry about the printing/saving/deleting when I get home. I figure for a two week holiday I would normally only go through about 8 rolls of 24 photos so a few memory sticks adding up to around 250 - 300 shots should be enough. And of course there will be shots I take which will obviously be awful and I can delete those ones straight away and save some memory that way.
Again thank you.

Today, eCost.com has a 128mb CompactFlash module for $0.00

I'm sorry but I have to disagree with several things that have been said. It is just not true that having a CD burned while on vacation is time consuming. At least not if you are going to major cities. In London, Paris, Florence, Venice and Prague in the last year or two I have been able to find places to burn a CD with out going one step out of my way. They are everywhere. They can burn a 512 mb memory card, usually while you wait, in about 10 minutes, for under 10&euro;. I don't see how you can call that a waste of time or money, especially in the case of Daneille who said she hasn't got her own CD burner and therefore she'd have to go pay to have it done once she gets home.

As far as &quot;always shooting at highest resolution&quot; - well that's fine if you have tons of memory, battery power and storage space - not to mention lots of time when you want to look at or edit them. The larger the image the more space, battery power, and time it takes to write the image to the card in the first place. The best photos are often captured because the photographer shoots several (5 or 10 even) of the same sceen in quick succession. Each one slightly different and you won't know which one the best one is till you open them up and look at them. All of this is much easier to do at a somewhat smaller resolution. If you want to spend a lot of time setting up a shot and then take only one and hope the expression/light/background/etc is perfect, then maybe highest resolution makes sense. But not in most cases. Plus, even if you want to crop down to a small portion of the shot, unless you also want to print an 11x14 of that small part, then shooting at a resolution between 1 and 2 mp is usually fine. It's certainly way more than adequate for the types of prints most people make. And as I said, you'll save not only space on your memory card, but time and battery power as well.

If you buy a 5MP camera and shoot at 1.6MP, why bother buying the 5MP?

Sure, shooting at lower resolution saves time and batteries.

How much time? Seconds. Only important if you're shooting action. If your're shooting action, you really want DSLR. Digital has...get ready... A Triple Second Delay. Some cameras are down to two seconds delay. Some cameras have a setting in the firmware that shortens the shutter lag time. Does your camera allow you to shoot in RAW format?

Buy spare batteries - rechargeables. I use 3 and that carries me through each day. Recharge when I get back to the cabin/house/hotel/sorority house for the night. I assume that you have or will soon purchase an electrical converter pack for travels to Europe.

Anyway, if a person is serious about knowing more about cameras and related topics, Fodors is not the place. I strongly suggest

WWW.DPREVIEW.COM

And as a Christmas gift from a loved one, or to yourself, consider taking a class in photography. You'll be amazed at the diffence in results in your photos.

Be certain to set your camera's date and time for the local time zone. This helps in re-creating your travels in a journal as you review the photos to determine where and when you experienced everything.

- - - buen viaje!

Daneille, it would be good if you could test drive your camera on a weekend trip before taking a major trip with it. Aside from the issue of getting used to the camera (which will probably require studying the manual repeatedly), you will need to get used to how often you use it. Knowing that will help you make some of the decisions you are making, especially the one about how much memory will be required to hold all of your pictures.

The reason I mention it is that I noticed that you plan on your memory cards holding about about 25% - 50% more pictures than you would have taken with your film-based camera. A lot of people find that they take a LOT more digital pictures than they took with film. It's not unusual to keep two or three times as many (after taking into account those that you will delete as you go along.) That's because there is no additional expense and hassle of taking more pictures, as is the case with film processing.

Something to think about. Only you will know for sure, and only after you've traveled with your digital camera.

Have fun with your new toys!

Again thanks.

Just for TripleSecDelay, I certainly will check out the website you mentioned - and thank you for that. I guess my questions directed at Fodors were more from a travelling-with-a-digital-camera point of view and what other travellers experiences/solutions were.

I am really looking forward to travelling light with this camera as my dear old SLR was a great big heavy thing (the camera bag itself being 1 foot long and 1/2 foot wide) and add into that extra lenses, film, mini tri-pod it was back breaking work carrying it around all day long - so I often just slung the camera around my neck risking it getting badly knocked about.

Danielle - I completely acknowledge a comfort level you may have here, instead of diving into a pool of sharks on a forum specifically for photo enthusiasts, however...there's a bit of cross over between these two boards.
There, you'll find people using the exact same camera model and you can ask direct questions concerning functions, etc. ;)

Welcome to the wonderful world of digital photography. Here is my favorite thing about having a digital camera.

I love to travel in Europe (maybe some others here will agree). I love to plan my trips. I like to go on the airplane. I love to be on the trip and I especially like to re-live my trips when I get back home. Here is where my favoirte thing of the digital photography comes in.

I load all my pictures onto my computer and set the screensaver to show the pictures in random order. No matter if I am at my desk at work or at the computer at home, I have a constant slide show of my European travels running.

Oh, by the way, I have a 5 meg camera and I shoot with a 512 meg flash card and carry a 256 meg spare. I can get about 600+ pictures all told and that is enough for the trips I have taken so far. The battary charger is bi-polar meaning it will work on 110 at home or 220 in Europe. I just carry an adapter plug with me and I can always have a spare battery in my pocket in case the one in the camera runs out of juice during the day. I recharge the battery every night in the hotel.

TripleSec - The reason I have a 5mp camera is to the have resolution WHEN I want it, which for me anyway, is not all the time. For example when I'm not traveling - and storage and battery life are not at issue, then I may use higher resolution. Even when I am traveling, when I'm shooting something I think I may want to enlarge, or just something I really like, then I'll up the resolution. But for a lot of the time it just isn't necessary, especially when traveling, and especially for someone who doesn't have a lot of memory. The original question indicated that she didn't want to spend a huge amount right now buying extra things (like portable hard drives/digital wallet, etc). She also said she had an &quot;old laptop&quot;, without a CD burner that she would like to get by without replacing for the time being. An older laptop is going to be slower at editing/showing large images. For those reasons I still think shooting at a resolution of between 1 and 2 mp would be best in her case.

The suggestion that you go to dpreview is good. It is a good site. Also good is megapixel.net. And at www.shortcourses.com you can get a huge amount of info. on using digital photography. That site has the info in the form of articles. Dpreview and megapixel both have forums but they tend to be more technical.

My favorite about digital photoraphy: Immediately determining if the picture is a good enough exposure, is well composed, and is focused properly. If not, I take the picture again (unless of course it is an action shot and the subjects are no longer available.)

By the way, I make all those determinations by looking through the viewfinder, not at the LCD screen. I never use the screen for anything.

I think what a person should consider is reviewing the photo histogram. A 2&quot; (or whatever size) LCD screen is inadequate for reviewing much more than framing and the presence/absence of the flash function.

Mike,

I, too , only use my viewfinder for framing shots.

In many cameras, the the view finder is not giving you a &quot;through the lens&quot; image. In that case, anyone relying on the viewfinder image will be disappointed.

That is why I sold my first digital cam and replaced it with a &quot;through the lens&quot; viewfinder.

Hi, I've periodically looked in at your digital camera discussions, but I can't seem to part with my old 35mm, which was not an automatic. The shutter speed and aperture opening were strictly in my fingertips. Though it was pretty much trial and error, I love the natural light indoor pictures I've been lucky enough to capture, also the low light outdoor ones using 400 film. Can you tell me which specifications I should look for in a digital -- so I'll have a choice about being in an auto mode or in full control?

I'm looking for a compact digital with high resolution, pretty good zoom, and very subtle color (I'm not happy with three greens if the scenery has fifty). If you smart folks could just tell me what specs to look for, I'll appreciate it. Thanks so much. J.

One our trip to London and Paris in September, we took our Digital Canon Rebel. Only complaint? Bulky. Not just a &quot;point and shoot&quot; camera. But, I look at the beautiful pics that we took, and that we have since enlarged and it was well worth the extra equipment and extra lens.
Also, my husband insisted on shooting some pics in RAW format to make sure they would be OK to enlarge (one shot of Sacr&eacute; Coeur in Paris from the top of the Arc de Triomphe comes to mind, taken with the bigger lens..breathtaking!)
We bought two 512 MB cards and took the cards to a place called Jessops (in London) and for 2 pounds, put all the pics on CD to free up the space on our cards. (keeping in mind this was our first trip to Europe and we ended up *keeping* 1100 pics!!)not counting the ones we deleted along the way!!!

You basically want the same specifications you'd be looking for in a new 35mm compact, i.e., that is has aperture-, shutter-priority, and full manual modes. In Canon (what I'm personally familiar with), these are the &quot;Creative&quot; modes (label P (programmed), Av, Tv, and M). However, given your interest in natural light photos, you have to be very careful about the sensor . In general, the compact camera CCDs have problems with noise at higher ISOs. I own a Canon A70 and try to avoid going over 100, and find 400 (the max) basically useless. The digital SLRs (like the Ditigal Rebel) generally have sensors that have much less noise. (I've heard the Canon 10D and 20D can be used at 1600 with still reasonable results.) The disadvantage is that, in general, they don't have live viewing, i.e., you can't use the LCDs to take the shot, only to review. Unfortunately, data on the noise levels is not something that is readily available, though most review of specific models should contain some data. Check out http://www.dpreview.com/ for lots of reviews and user forums.

Paul