My camera is called
hp photosmart E317
5.0 megapixels

I had planned on using the whole day on taking pictures with it but it only took ten pics before it was full..
Even though I had put it in macro mode I still had trouble focusing on the figure, it got blurred but the rocks and sticks around it were clear??
What am I doing wrong?

Hello there!, welcome to JD forums.
5.0 Megapixels seems good. for the pixel rate, and you've identified the Macro (usually a flower symbol) Mode for your camera.

It seems despite the design and functioning, your camera's lense has focused directly behind the figure and the scenery surrounding it, meaning either one of two things,
1. your either shooting in a function (landscape, portrait, beach) some camera's have this for different styles of light. My camera is a sony cybershot and it has Auto/Program/Beach/Snow/Twighlight/Twighlight Portrait & landscape are all different methods or ways to capture your shot, most are self explanatory, Landscape is for scenery shots and Beach is well, obviously to bring out the blue colours of the beach.

2. Despite macro mode being on, your way too close to the figure for the lense to capture it properly. A good way to find your camera's range is to do a test that GIJOCK told me to do along time ago.
Find yourself a subject to photograph, this can be anything from an action figure to a simple salt shaker..
Place it on the table in your house, and get yourself a ruler, next, take around 1-5 shots at various distances, but the same angle.
Start around 2 Inches away from the subject and after that increase the distance by around 3-5 inches. So that you end up with something like this...

1st shot - 2 Inches away
2nd shot - 6 Inches away
3rd shot - 10 Inches away
4th shot - 14 Inches away.

The idea here is to try and get a range/distance for your lense, where the subject comes into focus and looks clearer in the shot.

I hope this helps, please if anyone here can help out with any other advice, please post up and lets help this guy get his pictures right, I'm sure we've all been in this very scenario before!! I know I have

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If it is a range issue, then Rich is spot on with his advice! Best thing you can do is practise like Urban S described.

As for the camera getting full after a few shots your memory card might not be very big? What is the capacity of the memory card?

A way to squeeze a few more pictures out of the memory is to lower the resolution and amount of Mega Pixels you are using to take photos, if your camera allows for this of course. I'm not really up on HP camera's but I imagine it will have at least one of those options. I had an old Canon camera which you could change the resolution on and you could set it really low and the filesizes would be around or under 1 Megabyte in size!

If you can kick it down to 3 Mega Pixels you'll get a wee bit more memory free on the card and fair amount of quality with good resolution. Have a wee look at the camera manual to see if it can be done! I'm sure these temporary measures would help a little, at least until you can get a new larger capacity memory card.

Hope this helps Trench!

D

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I've a HP Photosmart M307 3.2 MP. What I do is hit the macro than get the subject (figure, for example) in the center and softly hit the buton. So it'll focus without taking the picture. Once you have it in focus on the screen trigger it again for the picture .

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Rich, I don't know if the advice helped, but the photo of the young lady in your signature was definitely inspirational!


FRank

She's ... had me feeling inspired for some time now

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Thanks for your advice. I will try them out.

I got a 1gb card in mine. Allows for about 900 shots at the 1200xWhatever range. If I change it to 600x800 (so the pics will take less space), who knows what I'll have. Well over 1000 shots. Thing is, my battery is only good for 100-200 shots. Yeah, that's a wide range, in reality. MOst shoots, the battery is dying by 100 shots. But the other weekend, I managed almost 200!!!

Rich and Dave hit the nail on the head. Move back. You don't need to take shots so close. That's what cut n crop are for! ( as well as enhancing the images to make them fuzzy or crisper as well as a million other things...)

How do you make the image crisper?