These notes are based on my experience with the Canon PowerShot S45.

Get a Compact Soft Carrying Case

I got the LowePro D-Res 8 carrying case. Its perfect! Key features:

• Easily attaches to a belt, so you can wear it on your side. You can get at the camera with a single hand
• Enough space to hold an extra battery. With the case on you belt, you can change batteries while shooting in about 10 seconds, while standing.
• Very compact. It fits the S45 snugly, and it offers good protection.
• Inexpensive!

Get Extra Batteries and Rotate Them

I bought two extra batteries, so I have a total of 3. I bought 2 non-Canon, after-market batteries on eBay quite inexpensively. They seem to work fine.

Then "rotate your batteries":

• Keep one battery in the camera, one in your case, and one spare.
• When the battery in the camera runs low, replace it with one in your case, put the spare (fully charged) battery in the case, and charge the battery that was in the camera. When the battery from the camera is charged, it becomes the spare.
• Before going out for a long all-day shoot, you may want to do a rotation. This guarantees you two fully charged batteries.
• Don't leave you spare battery in the charger! Its not good to leave the battery charging after its fully charged. And leaving the battery in the charger when the charger is unplugged will slowly drain the battery.
• Don't leave a battery in the camera for extended periods. (The battery will slowly drain, even with the camera off)

This approach ensures a long battery life by guaranteeing the batteries go through a minimum number of charging cycles, and that all batteries are used equally.

Get a Single Large Size, Compact Flash Card

I got a single 256 Meg CF Card, and this works great for me. It will store 125 Large/SuperFine JPEG images, and about 100 RAW Images. If you plan to shoot in RAW format, or be away for long periods, go for a 512 Meg Card.

The Micro-Drive cards use more power than Flash, so be careful about that.

I leave the card in the camera, and download to the computer using a USB cable. I find this clean, easy and reasonably fast. A full 256 Meg Card will download in 8 minutes. (My daughter provides the "full card" test case on a regular basis!)

Get the Right Kind of Tripod!

Get a full-size, light-weight tripod with a ball-head. If your digital camera is lightweight (and most are), you can get full-size, ball-head tripod for under $90 CDN. The ball-head is so much easier to use.

But a ball-head is the completely wrong thing for taking panoramas! For panoramas you need to pan the camera in a level plane. The ideal tripod for panoramas is a low-cost, light-weight video tripod. Its really useful if the tripod has a spirit-level build in, so that you can make sure its completely level for taking panoramas. You should be able to find one for less than $70 CDN.