I'm soon to experiment with bud photography. I bought a canon powershot A510 last july (05) but I only read the manual in the past few days. To take crystal clear close-ups I fink all settings must go to manual. I took that flower pic yesterday or the day before and was suprised at the difference manually configuring your settings makes in comparrison to Auto functions. I tried some night-time sky photography lastnight while toking a J after midnight (so no flash was used). I took Sigs advice from another thread and set my shutter speed to 15 second and got the other pic. I've now started photographing the same random objects lots of times to see how changing a setting affects the outcome, a bit like growing pukka bud really.