If you have not yet bought your camera and are looking at what is out there, you may notice there are basically two types of manufacturers.

Some are traditional camera-makers such as Olympus and Nikon, others are consumer electronics-makers such as Casio and Epson.

Generally, the non-camera makers offer more software with their machines, things such as programs to archive your pictures, and applications to stitch images together into panoramas. The traditional camera makers generally offer fewer extras, but better-looking pictures.

One other important feature to look for is USB, or Universal Serial Bus. You need a USB port on your computer to make use of this feature, which most newer computers do have.

Older Macs and Windows machines can have USB added via an expansion card which costs about $500.

USB is faster than parallel or serial connections, and you do not need to turn off your computer before connecting the camera.

Out in the field there are a few things you can do to improve the quality of your images. The most obvious is to turn the image quality setting up, which makes the image store itself at a higher resolution.

I bring up this point because I have found that many people use a lower quality setting because the quality looks OK on the tiny screen.

That is fine for everyday shooting, but when you want to shoot that beautiful sunset or breathtaking mountain view, take a second to turn the quality up for that one image. The lower quality settings may look fine on screen but you will notice a difference when you try to make an 8 x 10 inch print on your inkjet.

Another trick which holds true for both digital- and film-shooters is choosing the time of day to shoot. If possible, avoid shooting at midday when the sun is bright and directly overhead. The scenes will be very 'contrasty', with dark shadows and bright highlights.

Earlier or later in the day when the sun is at a low angle will give you bright, saturated colour and even light when you keep your back to it.

Shooting anything with a flash is best avoided with these little cameras. If you are indoors, artificial lighting will cause all sorts of colour problems which will be eliminated by using the flash. But you will see harsh shadows, and highlights on faces will usually turn bleach white.

While it is perhaps not the brilliant little trick you were hoping to hear, the best solution to this problem is to ask people to step outside where you can shoot in natural light.

Once your images are downloaded into your computer, there are other tricks you can use to help clean up your photos. When you are using Photoshop to adjust your image, NEVER use the brightness/contrast function.

This will compress the tonal range and can lead to detail-less highlights and shadows, particularly in digital images. The curves function can change the brightness and contrast of an image and is much safer.

Digital images often have colour problems that can be hard to correct - a highlight which is too blue and a shadow which is too red, for example. Add red to fix the highlight and the shadow gets worse, but add blue to fix the shadows and your highlight goes to pot.

Try using the selective colour function (Image>Adjust>Selective Colour. . .). Selective Colour will allow you to adjust highlights, mid-tones, shadows and most colours independently of one another.

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