Photography help needed

I suck at taking pictures. What I want to take photos of is origami. For example:

http://chwombat.net/gallery2/1920-2/img_1349.jpg

Notice the blur. Notice the suckiness. Click it for a bigger, even blurrier version. See more here: http://www.chwombat.net/gallery2/origami/ If it's not blurry, likely someone else took the picture or else I got lucky.

I have a Canon Powershot A510. I don't know if it's any good. It has a million settings, most of which I don't understand.

Everything looks better if I leave the flash off, but it's also blurrier. I suppose that's because the shutter stays open longer, to let enough light in to get a good picture?

I know enough to use Macro mode when I get up close to something, however I don't see that it makes any difference. Everything is still blurry.

Does anyone know how to take pictures that don't suck? Any pointers? Anything I can read to learn?

(ps also please look at my origami pictures. Origami is nice.)

You're right about the flash and the shutterspeed. But this is only an issue in low-light conditions.

Turn your flash off, put your mode to macro, and take your origami to a brightly lit place. Best thing to do would be to go outside sometime in the afternoon and take the picture out there where there's plenty of natural light.

The more light there is, the faster the shutterspeed will be and it'll be that much less blurry. Another thing to help with the blur is to set your camera on a mini stand or tripod and set it to a timer so that your hands don't cause movement or shaking.

This is all assuming that you're taking pictures in auto mode. If you can switch to manual mode, you can determine yourself how fast you want the shutterspeed to be and also the aperture as well. It might also be that you're not focusing properly causing an all around blur since there is no focal point. Be sure to focus on the origami itself before taking the actual picture.

To make things simple, just go somewhere with better lighting, keep the camera steady, focus on the subject and the blur shouldn't be an issue.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Miriel

The more light there is, the faster the shutterspeed will be and it'll be that much less blurry. Another thing to help with the blur is to set your camera on a mini stand or tripod and set it to a timer so that your hands don't cause movement or shaking.

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So it changes the shutter speed automatically depending on light? I didn't know that.

I will try outside in the daylight. I will try to invest in a cheap tripod or prop the camera up on something, I never thought of that. Thanks for your help.

You could also set your aperture to a lower number, letting more light in which would give you a quicker shutter speed.

At least, thats the way it works on my camera anyway.

Set a low aperture (inside anyways. You'll have to up it if you go outside), a very low exposure (1/250 seconds or smaller) and remember to focus it. I've never used the kind of camera you have, but perusing the manual canon has up for it, it seems perfectly capable of doing all that.