I continually see comments about not being able to get the best color in pictures, so I thought that I'd share some info that I got from my dad.
My father is a botanist and has traveled all over the jungles of Southeast Asia in his quest to find different ginger species. As a result, he and his fellow researchers have spent endless hours in the field with their cameras working to get the most accurate photos of these different plants for the scientific articles that they write. He has recently written an article in some scientific plant journal on photographing flowers.
So when I was out to visit him last year, we played a little with my digital camera. It isn't a DSLR, nor is it 100% automatic, but I am able to use different features to adjust the ISO and exposure time as well as aperature and f/stop.
What I found is that I was able to bring out the best colors changing the ISO. I have found too when I go back and look at the details of the pictures, my best pictures tend to come from my i-phone and the majority are with ISO's of 100 or less.
The other thing that really seemed to work (and gave us the best saturation of the deep blue/purple flowers that we were practicing on) was to not use the macro feature, but instead to step far back and then zoom in and use the flash.
This was the result:
Automatic settings
ISO-100, f/8, exp 1/4 sec, no flash
ISO-100, f/8, exp 1/60 sec with flash
ISO-200, f/8, exp 1/60 sec with flash
So the best thing to do is get to know your camera. Don't be afraid to mess around with settings, until you get what you like. The worst that will happen is that your battery will die and you will run out of memory on your card!!
