9. Shoot at High Quality

You can squeeze more photographs onto a memory card by adjusting the image quality. Lower-quality settings apply higher amounts of JPEG compression, which, loosely defined, reassembles an image's pixels into a grid of square blocks. This reassembly saves space, but it makes the image look less natural as well. Most cameras let you select from three compression settings, usually defined using comparative terms on their settings' menus. For example, Kodak uses the terms Best, Better, and Good, and Fuji uses the terms Fine, Normal, and Basic. Sometimes they vary on this theme a little. Epson, for example, uses a series of stars. Whenever possible, stick with the highest-quality setting. If you desperately need to squeeze more images onto a nearly full card, switch to the second-highest setting. But don't go any lower than that--if you do, your pictures will suffer.

7. Shoot in Pairs (at Least)

When shooting important images--staff parties, family functions, vacation photos--don't settle for a single shot. Like butterflies, digital pictures are free, so go nuts. The rule of thumb is to take no fewer than two pictures of virtually everything, four or five if the scene is even moderately interesting. Think fashion photographer: keep moving that camera and firing off shots. With lots of variations to choose from, there's a higher probability of getting a good photograph.

5. Eliminate Red-Eye

If you've ever shot a picture with a flash, you've no doubt encountered red-eye, in which everyone's pupils turn bright red, giving them a mildly demonic look. The culprit is dilated pupils. In dim light, the pupils are nice and big, permitting the flash to bounce off the inside of the retina and reflect back into the camera lens. One solution is to turn on your camera's red-eye reduction flash. This provides a preflash, which reduces pupil sizes so that the second flash is reflected harmlessly off the iris. The problem with a preflash is that it causes people to blink--and most of us would rather get red-eye than a bunch of closed eyelids. A better solution is to turn on a few lights or to shoot in a shaded area outdoors. By shining some light on a situation, you reduce pupil sizes naturally and limit your risk of red-eye.

4. Shoot Outside in Indirect Light

Most digital cameras offer built-in flashes, but they're not very good. When shooting in a dimly lit room or at night, a subject a few feet away will appear as a luminous ghoul against a pitch-black background. For the best results, shoot outside or in a naturally lit room during the day. A little cloud cover or tree shadow helps to soften the harsh color transitions you often get in direct sunlight. Counterintuitive as it may sound, low contrast is better than high contrast. There's nothing worse than a large area of white (called a hot spot) or black in a photo, because there's no way to fix it.

3. Use the Flash in Backlit Conditions

The best use for a cheesy consumer flash is to fill in shadows in full daylight. When you photograph a person against a bright sky--a condition called backlighting--the camera averages the light from the person and the sky and comes up with an intermediate exposure. But that exposure is too brief for the person and too long for the sky, so you get a dark silhouette against a blindingly bright background. The solution is to turn on the flash, a technique called fill-flashing. This not only lightens up the person, it also reduces the exposure so that the sky appears less bright.

2. Avoid Digital Zoom

Many digital cameras offer two kinds of zoom: an optical zoom and a digital zoom. Of the two, the optical zoom is the only one you should use. An optical zoom uses a system of lenses to refract light and to magnify an image onto the CCD. The result is expanded detail and clarity. A digital zoom crops and enlarges images, inventing pixels through interpolation. The result is a magnified but fuzzy image. If an optical zoom doesn't enlarge an image sufficiently, walk closer to your subject, but try to avoid the digital zoom.

1. For Close-ups, Use the LCD

Very few digital cameras under $1,000 offer single-lens reflex (SLR) viewfinders, the kind in which you and the camera see through the same lens. Far more popular is the rangefinder design, in which you see through one lens, the optical viewfinder, and the camera sees through another, the primary lens element. Although these lenses are designed to converge at the same point, they can't help but vary slightly as you zoom in and out. And they may vary dramatically during close-up shots, a phenomenon known as parallax. Therefore, most optical viewfinders are highly suspect.