Garden Snail

I've moved this snail from the Arthropod category to the Other category for you. Arthropods have exoskeletons and articulated joints; think flies, crabs, dragonflies.

He/she was about 3 inches long, i guess theres nothing in the photo for scale!

Awesome!! I love the detail on this guy :D Snails are so cool. And he looks like a pretty big one!

Hint - I use an old plastic slide viewer with the slide holder removed and held over the screen of my TZ7 with a rubber band, it works wonders. An eyeglass would also do but it only covers part of the screen.

The narrow depth of field on your photo can be partly overcome by manually adjusting the aperture to its smallest and lowering the shutter speed to compensate, if that is possible on your camera.

Theres no zoom on this photo (only cropping), I was right up in his/her face! (apparently they're both sexes)

I was using full zoom whilst trying to photograph far away birds that weren't impressed by my attempts to get nearer to them, but I get what you're saying. I find taking pictures with zoom quite tricky, I'd love a camera with an old-style viewfinder, trying to squint at a screen in full sun isn't fun

You could try using a little less zoom and see if the smaller picture has better quality. It doesn't have to be big unless you want to print it big.

The technical ins and outs of cameras is very confusing to me :) I'd love to get into it more, but for now the investment required puts it out of my reach.

I went for the TZ10 because of the wide-angle and the sale price, the macro shots do come out great though!

But I am getting better compositions, so I must be learning :)

Love your description :D

The TZ series are great little cameras but the physical size of both the sensor and the lens cannot hope the get anywhere near the quality of larger ones. Even the DSLRs can fall down on that score unless the lighting is very good. When using 12x zoom you need to use 12x speed and 12x aperture to maintain the quality and the latter is not an option!

...can't be worse than my disappointment about the regular objective that came with the Nikon D80....400 ISO in half-shadow and you got a gravel-like dithering like using a 1600 ISO...

I tend to just use regular macro, then crop the image, i get better focus that way, and as its fairly high MP i can crop it pretty small and keep the clarity.

I got the Lumix when it was on sale, its a good camera for an amateur like me, but if I'd paid the full price I'd be pretty disappointed by how poor the full-zoom photos come out, considering the 12X optical is a selling point!

same here with my Pentax Optio S12...Makro is much better than the zoom (even the optical)...the autofocus using super-makro is a real pain in the a**...though...always sharpness and detail on the wrong spots...and no idea how to switch it off...

thanks! My camera (Lumix TZ10) isn't very good at range, but close up shots come out really nice

nice clean shots, Matthew