Here is my first photo.  I was foolin' around with zooming in and cropping it and that is why it is so grainy.   My camera is a Kodak EasyShare C300 with 3.2 Mega Pixels.

This photo sucks, but I am going to do a painting of it and it is just a starting point for me to work from.

Kickass!    That will make a good painting. My girlfriend does that; takes photos with her digital and then paints them. Good idea. Have fun with it! Just for shiggles, you ought to take a pic of the painting when you get it done and post that in this thread too.

Thanks!  I'll be sure to do that!  I am too cheap to spend money on artwork for my place so I do all my own.  I actually used to be really good (well, the best in my high school, for whatever that is worth) so I should be able to make this look pretty cool.  

I'll try and get something going this weekend!

hey, you didn't say if it was a gift or not...

looks like the lighting condition weren't optimal. hence the noise (graininess) and artifacts. also you mentioned zooming in. that camera doesn't have any optical zoom (only digital zoom). what digital zoom does is crop, then blow up the image, which degrades the image quality. it's like throwing away the megapixels. so you never use digital zoom (NEVER!). instead you walk closer to the subject.

Yep.  Only digital zoom.  It was crowded where I took that photo.  I needed to crop out a bunch of people.  I probably won't use it most of the time.

And it was a gift from my brother.

Funny, my wife and I got a digital camera for Christmas too.  It was gift from my brother, his fiance, and our dad.  It's a Kodak Z740 with the big 10x zoom, 5 MP.  Pretty nice!

jeff