Re: the camera? Any brands/models to recommend?
I;m no expert and no photographer - I was just looking for something inexpensive that had the ability for a memory card.
Mine is a concord 2000 and it is a work horse for my purposes - which is scenery, the kid, the dogs and FReeps. without a memory chip I can set it to take from 33 (high resolution top quality) pix to 126 (low resolution economy quality) without downloading. It's got 3 different zoom settings. And we paid $65 almost a year ago.
You can problably do better now.
We decided what we wanted, then searched through the websites and looked at the price range we wanted. And rmember, I'm notoriously cheap when buying something for myself.
For more profesional information I would suggest asking NYCGOPCHICK or ValerieUSA.
We have an Olympus and find it easy to use.