I find a tripod plus self timer and natural daylight are the best recipe. But you're right, it does seem like a hassle for progress shots.

There are a couple of easy things you could do to improve the above pic though:

1) Increase the exposure a bit, either with the camera or afterwards using Photoshop or Picasa or whatever you're using to crop the images.

2) (more important) Turn up the JPG quality, both in your camera (usually best to set it as high as possible) and in your computer program. When you zoom in on your image, you can see all the detail of the brickwork is lost in the JPG blocking. It also messes with the colours a bit. If your program has a percentage setting for "JPG quality", try something between 60% and 80%.

Hope this is useful!

A cheap photographic light box helps - white fabric covered box with one open side, which you put bright lights around. This gives a uniform difused light to the subject within. Jessops sometimes have them for sale at good prices.

Then, add cheapy close-up filter lenses to the end of a zoom camera:

http://www.2mm.org.uk/articles/budgetphotos/index.htm

- Nigel

Hi

My digital camera has a macro facility, but as yet I have not used it! The book provided by cannon is A5 and nearly 20mm thick. I can see from looking at the link in Nigel's comment that might be a help. I also take the point about using natural light.

Lisa