Dont forget the fantastic Fuji S5600 – great value for money, and has better “growth” capability than many others, as it allows you to fit a teleconverter (for even bigger zoom) or wide angle lense. Generally, in my experience, the Fuji range offer the greatest flexibility.

Also, you can use the Intenet to gain flexibility on pricing. Places like Jessops will price match some, if not all, Internet prices, and as the Internet can be quite a bit cheaper, its worth printing out the page. They’ll make a phone call to head office to see if the price is matcheable.

I saved over £130 on a digicam at Jessops like that. Got it same day, in my hand too.

To find the camera of your choice, do a search on Google – or even better – Froogle (same home page as Google).

Well, I think with the original scan I could make that Swordfish picture look even better.

Here’s what I managed to do just passing it through digital noise filtering software:

Hope you don’t mind PL

This doesn’t sound right. An S7000, like the S5000’s, teleconverter should still allow full use of the zoom function on the camera (vignetting notwithstanding). I know mine does (S5000). So am I missing something in this discussion?

What is a histogram? How do I access & use/manipulate it? I use a Finepix S5000.

Yep it was chocka by 10:30 – although I didn’t notice any change to the parking arrangements – they were the same for me as last year, and in previous years – near enough. But I do agree about the ablutive arrangements – there were no proper urinals and there seemed to be a lot (and I do mean a lot) less toilets than in previous years. I noted they seemed to be new ones, so maybe they’ve changed the contractor.

Left at 4 and got away okay, even though almost everyone seemed to have the same idea.

MS Photo Editing Software

Please be careful – some MS applications make irrevocable changes on the original image – which means you could loose the original if you’re not careful.

Always, always, copy an image to another folder, and work on that copy, never an original you will want to leave that completely untouched (even if it is just to revisit and redo the job at a later date).

In fact, the default Windows XP viewer may change an image if you simply rotate it to view it (it does warn you, but it is easy to make a mistake, even so) – so I would say don’t even view an original image, unless you’re confident it isn’t likely to be changed.

Saving your image
After editing the image to your liking, select ‘Save as…’ from the ‘File’ menu.
NEVER use the ‘Save’ button on the toolbar as this will overwrite the original file!!
Give the image a new name or select a different folder to save it in, and press the ‘More>>’ button at the bottom of the dialog. On the slider that is now visible, adjust the JPEG quality factor to 50-60%. This should give you an image which is small enough (in filesize) to upload to these forums. If you are saving an edited version of an image for your own archive, it is better to save as a .TIF file without any compression as you will not lose any image quality in this format.

I would revise this to reflect what I say above – that is create a new folder for images you want to work on, and copy the target image file there – leave the original completely untouched otherwise.

That way, if you do make a mistake and use the “save” option, you’ll save yourself a lot of hair (and I know a few of you are somewhat deficient in that area as it is).