Thanks so much, everyone. We have had professional photos done and they are great and of course we can't replicate that quality at home but thanks for the ideas of affordable cameras.

www.onevisionimaging.com is another place to go for printing; they are a bit more sophisticated than photobox and can adjust the prints by hand. More expensive, but not excrutiatingly so. We've had good luck with them anyway. There are no doubt other places, too.

tmnewbornimages@gmail.com

That would be great, thanks!

What is your email address as I can't seem to send attachments via this site?

Photoshop offers quite a lot but then I appreciate it is a very complex piece of software. I would be happy to have a look and see what I can do to improve them. Could you email me with a sample picture? The bigger the file/size/image the better.

I have the same problem with my point and shoot and will have to replace it with something fancier at some point.

However, I was wondering if anyone knew if there is anything that can be professionally done about photos that haven't come out very well?

Sadly the photos taken in hospital when my son was born are dreadful and we were wondering if anything can be done about that?

We had exactly the same issue. Our canon ixus sometimes took photos which were fine (outside particularly) but inside the shots were blurred without a flash or with a flash lit up my twin babies' in a bit of a weird way.

I asked my brother for advice - he's not professional or anything but an interested amateur.

He recommended an Olympus E-PL2 with a pancake lens (total cost of about £700). The camera is a "micro two thirds" camera. Its quite a bit smaller than a normal SLR but takes photos of that quality. It's not exactly pocket sized, but certainly doesn't need it's own bag! The pancake lens (for technical reasons which I can't even begin to explain!) allows you to take photos in lowish light levels without a flash.

The photos we get are beautiful - with brilliant focus and depth - we get the sort of "professional" shots that I used to be jealous of with friends with SLRs. I'm so glad we bought it and only wish we'd done it when the boys were younger!

I can't find a link to the E-PL2, but I presume the EPL-3 is the next model.

http://www.bristolcameras.co.uk/p-olympus-pen-lite-e-pl3-14-42-lens-kit.htm

http://www.bristolcameras.co.uk/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=h-h020

I have been very happy with my Canon S90. Perhaps at the higher end of the market for point and shoots but does really well in low light situations and equally well outdoors.

I manage to take really good shots of my little one with minimal effort. Does great on a high ISO setting and the shutter speed is fast enough to keep up with a crawler. It has auto settings but you can shoot in RAW mode if you are good with photoshop or the like.

It also has a ring feature which mimics the experience of changing lenses. Allows you to get wide angle shots which are great for portraits.

When I was researching this camera, it also looked like fuji finepix does well in low light settings.

If you intend on doing large blow ups perhaps this is not the best camera and a pro SLR would be better.

Would recommend checking out sites like wired or dpreview for more info and comparisons.

Hope that helps

Hi,

It all depends on how much you want to spend. You mentioned that your indoors shots were particurarly challanging. Unfortunatelly, this is something you will have to come to terms with unless you are willing to splash out at least £1400.
I don't want to go too much into boring details but in a nutshell to photograph moving children you need a high shutter speed and a camera that handles high ISO well OR just plan and composition your shots more carefully. Make them play somewhere near the window where there is plenty of light and thus no need for such high ISO ( which causes that grainy 'effect')

This is why proffesional photograpers need to charge you £600 for a shoot to make a half than decent living. All my gear is worth more than £18000 but when I ask my customers to pay £700 for a shoot thay just can't understand why so much. Take your travelling time, petrol, prints, post processing and there is very little left.

Please call me on 07903194929 or email me and I am sure I will be able to help you buy the best gear for you budget

see my website:
http://tmnewbornimages.co.uk/?page_id=62
email
tmnewbornimages@gmail.com

Hi,

We're thinking of buying a new digital camera. Our Sony 6.0 cybershot is good, but doesn't seem to handle our, er, active one year old. The indoor shots are especially bad. It does a great job with outdoor photos of people who stay still! Does anyone have suggestions for a compact, pretty high-quality digital camera to use for photos of kids?

Thanks!