I wanted to get back to your thread today because I just looked up the sx720 Canon and recognized it. My ex-wife owns one of these and I have actually used this camera. It has a 40x optical zoom and 4x digital Zoom. Using only the true, optical zoom, the maximum telephoto setting is incredibly long. I do not own a lens long enough to even begin to compare to how powerful the maximum telephoto is on this small camera!
With its 20.3 megapixel sensor, this is a type of digicam that is fairly new. A good optical zoom of extrordinary range, and a high megapixel sensor. Before his death Michael Reichmann at The Luminous Landscape became enamored of this type of camera, of which there are only a handful.
Again back to the tripod issue that JC mentioned above. A tripod can help you frame close-up photographs such as those of flowers or still life scenes, or landscapes, and you can take a photo and look at it on the back of the camera and then make Minor Adjustments to the camera or the lens etcetera, to get a vastly improved photo while still on-scene. A tripod causes you to slow down and to think about your compositions in a way that is very different from handheld shooting. And with the sx720's extremely powerful telephoto, I believe that a tripod would greatly improve your long-distance photography. Again for those unfamiliar with it the maximum zoom setting on this camera is incredibly, incredibly long.
The last thing I want to recommend is any one of the 32 books written by famous photography educator John Hedgecoe. His books illustrate photography with hundreds of small photos and diagrams,broken down into fantastic lessons, and his book Complete Photography Course, for example is very helpful. If you would like to see photography explained in words and pictures and broken down into hundreds of individual topics and sub-topics, the many books of John Hedgecoe, a former professor of Photography at London's Royal College, are still unsurpassed. There is a saying "You don't know what it is that you don't know." That old saying is very true in this day and age of self-taught learning via the web . And this is where the John Hedgecoe books come into play. Your new camera has a wide-angle, normal, telephoto, and super telephoto, and a macro lens built-in. You could read one of his books and have all of the equipment he details, within your brand new Canon. This is why I have gone to such lengths on this post: you have an amazing digicam. Even though we now have videos on YouTube and the world wide web, I do not believe there has ever been a better photographic educator and author than John Hedgecoe. That is why publishers were willing to release 32 books written by the man. I would look online at amazon.com and buy any one of several of his book titles. You now have a camera that can take you to Great Heights photographically.
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