Advice on a good camera and lense

[fasih23]

I want to buy a camera and a lense to feed my new found hunger in photography. i always like taking photograph with my Canon 10 megapixel camera but i don't the quality/sharpness of pics that I would want. Its alway blurry when i remove flash or when i do use flash the background gets hidden. please advice me a good amatuer camera and lense that i can use at home with my family and while on my vacations.

Many Thanx

[bambleweeney]

Hi, sounds to me like you're making a couple of elementary mistakes here and a new camera won't help you immediately.
Blurry without flash sounds very much like the wrong shutter speed, you can't really hold a camera steady for longer than about 1/30 second, the natural movement in your hands and body will move the camera and thus your photo will be blurred. A flash will give you a burst of light that has a very short duration and if you like, this is more or less the equivalent of having a very fast shutter speed, motion is frozen, including that of your hands and your photo is sharper.
Hidden background, I'm guessing you mean really dark here. That's just physics I'm afraid. Light falls off dramatically over distance so that your subject will be nicely lit but anything behind depending on just how far away will receive just a fraction of the light from the flash and so will appear much darker or even totally black, quite useful if you plan for it, really frustrating if you don't. You should set your exposure to 'balance' the flash with the background in this case, in fact a lot of cameras have a control that allows you to do this, check your camera manual.
So with the best camera on the planet you will still get pretty much the same results. I'd strongly suggest you have a read through the tutorials on the site and practice while you're trying to decide on your new camera. Everyone has there own preferences and I'm pretty sure there will be loads of suggestions and recommendations from other members regarding choice of camera.
Read the tutorials, they're really good, practice and play.

[Colin Southern]

Hi, sounds to me like you're making a couple of elementary mistakes here and a new camera won't help you immediately.

I'll 2nd all that Paul wrote.

I'd encourage you to post some samples of problem shots here so that we can work out where things are going wrong.

[Geoff F]

And when you post some samples try to give some background information about the camera model and lens used; plus aperture, shutter speed, etc.

Modern camera manufacturers are on a pixel arms race which in most cases is totally unnecessary. 10 mp should be ample for most purposes.

I remember when Nikon shocked the digital photography world by producing a 3 mp camera.