I've noticed a few pictures on this board could use a little tweaking to make them a bit clearer. I have a few hints (though by no means an exhaustive list) on how to improve our picture quality...
1) Get a stand for your camara
Holding your camara by hand means you wobble, I have one of those monkey grip stands, very useful since you can attatch it to most anywhere
2) Use a remote/timer
Don't press the picture button with your finger, that'll make your camara wobble, either use the timer function, or if you have a remote then use that
3) Use a plain background
A white sheet of paper does wonders for unifying the background and making things stand out, lean the paper against a wall/box so that the paper has a smooth contour between the part on the ground/table and the part being propped up, your models should hold it in place
4) Lighting, lighting, lighting...
Imagine Tony Blair saying Education repeatedly and you have the right idea, you should be using lamps (ones that give off white light, like painting lamps) rather than the flash, preferably one from above and another form the side, then put a reflective surface on the opposite side to reflect the light back!
5) Use macro mode
If your camara has a macro mode use it, but note they (usually) don't work with zoom functions, so if you want to zoom move the camara itself.
6) Crop, levels, sharpen
Crop the image as we don't need to see half a picture of your wall when we want to see your carefull work. Adjust the levels because camaras are finickity and capture light that you don't really need to see. Sharpen as most camaras tend to be a little blurry unless you took the picture really well. Also consider resizing the image so that it doesn't make the forum extent to 10x its normal size (or the dreadful scrollbars).
To highlight the importance of these three I have taken one of Archon Fariath's IG pictures (sorry if thats rude, but hey an archon playing IG... we need more DE around here!) see which you think is best to look at.
Origional:
Cropped, sharpened & auto leveled:
Resized:
Thats all the tips I can think of off the top of my head, hope they help, I want to see some pretty pictures of all your stuff!
