I did a number of photos this morning trying to duplicate your advice - used the 2 second timer, a tripod but found the smallest F stop my camera goes to is F8. I am using a Canon A70 - anyway, lots of the photos were out of focus.
Vaughn's camera must be an SLR-style digital to have that high of an f-stop number available. Our smaller-format cameras match up with their bigger brothers when it comes to shutter speeds (how many ways are there to measure time?) but the f-stop values for exposure are entirely different. My Canon A540 only goes up to 8.0 as well, and that's normal. In fact, the word is that it's hard to get an
out of focus picture on a digital camera when you really
want to (fuzzy backgrounds for portraits or other telephoto shots, etc).
I can't tell how far your camera was from the HF when you took the pics, but it could have been "on the borderline" between the normal and macro ranges. Here are the different focusing ranges according to the chart near the bottom of [
THIS PAGE] from the [
Steve's Digicams] review site:
Normal : 1.5 ft. - infinity
Macro : 2.0 in. - 1.5 ft. (Wide) / 10 in. - 1.5 ft. (Telephoto)
If you're not familiar with the Macro mode, you normally enter it by pressing the "flower" button on the back of the camera. A matching flower will appear in the LCD screen (image from [
Review Page 3] on Steve's DigiCams):
The caption for the image right above that one talks about the manual focus feature (with onscreen distance gauge!) that you might to check into as well.
Unfortunately, using the Macro Mode on an object this deep will usually cause some foreshortening (a bulge-y look) and you will be hard-pressed to get the whole object in focus. The trick here is to switch back out of Macro mode, move the tripod
back and
zoom IN. That will tend to flatten the image a little more, but hopefully your lighting setup will "give bacK" some of the depth you lose.