Great photos come with experience, but there are a few tips and tricks you can learn from the experience of others to help you improve your photographing experience. Listed below are eleven of them:

1. Use the tripod and self-timer of your digital camera. These two things will give you better chances to take sharper and clearer photos.

2. Keep the background tidy and clean. Before taking the photo, remove all things that you don't want to include in it from the area. This will also help you focus on the subject without having your eyes distracted by the surroundings.

3. Place the camera as close as you can. Look into the screen of the camera and make sure that the things you want in the photo almost fill it. Using the macro function can really help. Look into the manufacturer's manual to see how to use it and which distances are appropriate.

4. Make sure that the subject of the photo is in focus. A de-focused picture is unpleasant to look at and almost impossible to improve afterwards. If your photo is not focused, take a new one.

5. Stay away from dark shadows. Indirect sunlight and flash are much better for photographing than artificial or direct sunlight.

6. Take some time to think about what you want to photograph before setting up the camera equipment.

7. Improve the final result by rotating, cropping, resizing, sharpening and compressing if necessary. However, take your photo in such a way as to reduce the amount of necessary editing to a minimum. For example, removing unwanted objects from the picture is not something you should need to do.

8. Read the manufacturer's manual to get to know all the features your camera has and be able to use them. Some of the most important things to learn about the camera before starting to use it are the self-timer, how to take pictures using the macro and manual focus settings, how to set the white balance and exposure levels, how to zoom in and out from the subject you want to photograph and how to adjust the resolution for your photos.

9. Don't be shy to try experimenting. Try to put the techniques you read about into practice to see for yourself how they work. Change the angle of the photo, rotate the object you are focusing on, use different lighting, try out various background colors and exposure levels. You may be surprised of how much a certain technique can improve your photo.

10. Set your expectations right. You shouldn't expect to get the perfect photo from the first shot. This rarely happens. Two or three shots are not enough either, you generally need at least five before deciding you couldn't have done it any better.

11. If you are using the camera's built-in flash for craft and jewelry photography, you should also use the power cord which comes along with the camera to generate as much light as possible out of the flash unit for each photo. As you are using the camera, even if you don't use flash, the batteries will discharge and the output from the flash unit will also decrease.

If you are using all of these tips you should see an instant improvement in your photographing. You may have them printed if you want and refer to them any time you are taking a new photo.