Interesting comments, Mark, From personal experience I have discovered everything you have written to be absolutely spot on.

I caught this trout somewhat flat footed on Thursday, it was blissfully unaware of my attention. It is well into double figures and can be located at that all too familiar location of 'Spot X'.

This picture was taken at a range of about eight metres using a 300mm telephoto lens, the water was about a metre deep.



This is what you can do with a good camera, this is a close up of the trout's head. note there is no loss of quality in reproducing such an image. That is what you are paying for.



Paul, if you get a point and shoot camera and you wish to take good pictures, you must learn to take the camera out of it's built in 'automatic setting's mode', and learn to set the shutter speed, the aperture and the focussing yourself. Many times the camera will set what it believes to be the best settings for reproducing a picture, but this can be vastly improved if you learn those settings yourself. This is not as difficult as you will be lead to believe, the picture on the camera's screen will tell you how well you are doing.

Sorry about the size of the photos, I thought Tiny Pic had a self editing system to reduce the size of pictures. Obviously not.