Mopery wrote:
hawkeye:
i received my camera earlier this week. fantastic recommendation! i had my daughters wave at the camera while i took a picture and zero blur. i also love the feature where it snaps 2 consecutive pictures, with and without flash, so i can review which one came out better.
good video quality as well.
thanks again!
Glad you like it so far. I'd recommend going to dpreview.com forums in the Fujifilm section if you want to learn more about the nuances of these cameras. You can get good shots if you just use it as a point and shoot, but can get GREAT shots if you really learn the camera. One thing to be careful of with the N+flash mode (2 pictures like you said) is that the natural light one, on my F30 at least, tends to hike the ISO up higher than needed and the pictures are noisier than if you used say Auto 800 ISO setting in another mode.
A couple other recommendations. Only use Auto mode for flash pictures. If you use it with suppressed flash it will also hike ISO up higher than needed. My experiences are with the similar but older F30 so some of this might have been improved with yours. Slow Sync flash is great for not blowing out peoples faces with flash and making sure the background is also visible and not black like other cameras do. However, it uses relatively slow shutter speeds like 1/15 or 1/20 of a second. If you have trouble hand holding at those speeds, use -EV (exposure compensation) and it will bump up the shutter speeds a bit.
Also, if you are around water a lot or plan on going on vacation with the family you might want to invest in an underwater housing for this camera. Mine for the F30 was about $100 online and yours would be a bit more. We went on a cruise earlier this year and I got a ton of cool pictures of fish while snorkeling. It will go like 30m below the surface too for scuba diving or is great if you don't want to get your camera wet and ruined. Better than buying a junky disposable underwater film camera. Here's the link for the housing for the F40. Let me know if you have any questions or issues with the camera. I really want one myself to complement my F30 but own 6 cameras right now and my wife would kill me if I bought another one.
I also don't know if I posted it before but check out a free program from Google called Picasa. It does a great and incredibly easy job of image editing and also organizes pictures very well for viewing or printing.
Link to Picasa and underwater housing below. Enjoy.
http://picasa.google.com/
http://www.buy.com/prod/fuji-underwater ... 23214.html