Thanks for the advice everyone - much appreciated, Mark - I'm so jealous! In my "defence", my camera is not one of the more recent Lumix models - it is DMC FZ7. I guess the truth of the matter is that I'm a cr*p photographer. Still, I'll hang in there and keep trying. I'm planning to go on...

Having tried, somewhat unsuccessfully, to photograph butterflies with my Panasonc Lumix (the damned thing will auto-focus on everything except what I want - a leaf, twig, bush, anything except the butterfly and then with lag between pushing the button and shutter activating, it's gone anyway!), I wa...