taking good photos with a regular camera

think about your subject and interesting ways of shooting them follow the light and shaddows and use them in unusual ways practice holding your breath and having a steady hand always take 2-3 shots of the same thing play around with focus points

Can you post pictures of what your were photography so we can critique.

O your taking picture of clothes? I thought you were taking picture of architecture, kids, or animals. lol

taking good pictures for clothes helps it sell. I tried to sell these boots for $40 for a month with crappy photos from my bad camera, then I reposted with pro pics from a blog and they sold for more than twice the original amount in 1 week

You are correct, I was under the impression that you were talking more along the lines of "artistic" photography, as in dealing with the subject and environment. I suppose if you need to compensate for poor image quality due to the camera, try a little post processing to brighten up the image or to get the color of an item closer to what it should be.

torrent search for light room, that is what I use for a lot of my minor editing.

with a point and shoot digital camera, whats the best way to take fit pictures? Zoom in all the way (ie object becomes large) and moving back further away, lighting (natural light?), camera level (eye-level, or slightly below?) etc.

I'm not sure on how your specific point&shoot works, but with SLRs you generally want a moderate zoom (85mm-105mm on fullframe) for portraits - get too close and certain details are amplified, like the nose, and lines are distorted. On a p&s, zooming in too much would increase the noise (=more pixelated) though. Usually, the ideal light is that in the evening or early morning on a late spring day: strong enough to keep the ISO low, but with nice shadows and hue. Mid-day sun is rather harsh.

Depends on how much you can zoom, but try to stay clear of the wide angle reach for fit pics (to prevent unattractive distortion). "Conventional" 50mm (what your eyes see) or a bit more is fine. Eye-level is probably too high"”unless you have a lot of room, you would have to tilt the camera down, and you should try to avoid tilting (up or down). (A lot of) natural light is best.

Does that camera have any manual settings? Or is it a straight P&S?

If you can adjust the aperture, use the widest aperture (smallest number) and a low shutter speed 1/30 1/40 if you're indoors so you can get in the most light.

Otherwise, I would suggest building a light box. You can do it fairly simply, and get really good shots of your stuff :

10$ light box

-rf

Unfortunately, the old Powershots are a bit better as you could shoot in RAW.

But my tips are:

Lighting! This is more important than what camera you use. Photography is based on light, invest in some lamps and lighting equipment if you want better commercial style pictures.

ISO - A lower iso gives better image quality. But it is "slower" (i.e. slow film @ 50-100 iso). But it requires more light as it will capture more slowly. 100-200 should be perfect for taking pictures of clothing (assuming you have sufficient light).

Optical zoom is good, digital zoom is bad - Optical zoom is how far the lens is capable of zooming itself. Digital zoom is how much the image can be zoomed using camera software. Some cameras have combination zooms 3x optical and 10x digital. Once you go past your optical zoom limit, picture quality deteriorates.

Tripod! Also very important, using one of these + using lighting equipment will do more for your photos than a new camera.

Learn how to meter (take light readings) - This is difficult for people as the world is in color and people don't naturally visualize hue, they see lightness/brigthness and chroma. You want to know where the middle grey is in your frame. Just because you see red, yellow and orange doesn't necessarily mean that orange is the middle grey. You can see what I mean if you have a B&W funtion for your LCD display.


Aperture and shutterspeed are just fiddling with silly and useless numbers if you don't understand light and how to meter.

The best possible indirect light and don't move at all. Those two things will improve in photo.