Gorgeous pictures - who are the roses? Oh, and forgive my ignorance - what is an "SLR"?

Jackei

The bush is Pompon Blanc Parfait. The cut flowers are St. Patrick. SLR is a camera that you can view the picture through the lens and they have removable lenses.

Your going to love not having shutter lag for pictures of those huge slugs you have. Can't wait to see more pictures.

Here is a site that really explains the SLR camera:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLR_camera

Steve, I'd say your camera does a great job of dealing with that problem. I simply get around it by taking pictures only on overcast days or in the morning and evening. I've never really been happy with any pictures I've taken on sunny days, and I have to say your camera is much superior to mine in that respect.

Ingrid

One of the reasons I grow roses is so I can photograph them. There is a newspaper writer that does a technology column in the local paper. I emailed him with the issue and this was his response:

"It is typical of small cameras. The dynamic range (ratio light to dark) is limited. It is limited comparing film to digital, but even more so with a small sensor camera."

I got a new Olympus e-pm1 on Amazon for $250 delivered. They are even cheaper on other sites. They can be found for 1/2 what I paid refurbished, but I generally like to buy new. The other lenses for the camera are very expensive (like getting a free razor, so you will buy the blades). With the limited pictures, I've taken, I'm pleased with it.

Steve, please excuse me from jumping in here, I'm new to the gardenweb forum and the last thing I want is to tick people off.

As far as the dark areas in your picture try taking your pictures with the flash turned ON. Hopefully the light will fill in the shaded areas.

To get a digital camera that is close to being equal to film you need one that is 32 megapixels in size. Anything higher allows you to blow up the pictures and retain the quality but your eye isn't going to see much difference.

Toolbelt68: The flash on my little camera isn't going to help much when there is bright sunlight and shadows. As long as you aren't trying to make prints, I've got nice pictures after cropping with a 3mp camera. I'm not trying to get film quality from a digital camera.

I bought a top of the line Epson flatbed film scanner that you load with strips of negatives and it converts It to individual images and an Epson Color printer for hard copy. I haven't used it for a while because the set up takes up some space. I have a lot of b/w negatives to work with if I ever have the time.

Too bad the flash won't do the job.
I picked up a color slide converter but ended up not having the patience to convert all of my old slides. Maybe I'll hire a kid to come in and do the job piece work. Well maybe not, since the PC folks would have me locked up if they found out I was hiring a kid. Over 300 slides to convert so the kid could make some serious money..... :-))
Nice chatting with you...

I also found I didn't have the patience to convert my old slides. I meant well, but . . .

I used Olympus SLRs for years (film) and I am now using an Olympus E-500. It does a good job for me, but I don't know what I would next move on to.

For a "pocket" camera, I tried a little Nikon Cool-Pix, found it SORELY lacking, and took it back to Costco, whence it came. I replaced it with a Canon PowerShot A2500, which fills that niche nicely. At a push, I can get a decent rose image with it, and it's good for snapshots of the dogs, and events.

Jeri

A rather inexpensive item to improve photos, is one of the "cubes" (photo light tent like to do small product photos) I cut the bottom out of mine so I can set it down and over a vase(etc)

Taking photos early or late in the day will help and on a cloudy/overcast day.

You can also stand back and zoom in to blur the background. (if you have an optical zoom)

A $2 piece of white poster board can be propped up to reflect light back to open up shadows.

And there are a lot of modifiers for flashes that can help, but the best thing to do with a flash is buy a second and use them off the camera to add depth and highlights (Ratio in your cameras flash manual if you have that type of flash)