Originally Posted by nav

Yeah, that's exactly what it's doing.

If it's a point-and-shoot digital camera with no macro mode (a little flower symbol normally denotes the macro mode), hold the camera to your face (yeah, the 'normal' viewfinder always sucks on point and shoots, but the contact with your head provides some stabilization, especially with really light weight mini-cameras), don't use the zoom (especially if it's not optical zoom), make up for the poor auto-focus distance by standing back a bit (crop out the your foot or other object from the surrounds once you get the image on your computer, most newer point-and-shoot cameras have high pixel counts but relatively poor clarity so you end up shrinking the image later afterward), and make up for the tiny lens and ineffective flash by having as much ambient light as you can get (but no abnormally reflective objects behind your target). Oh, and take tons of shots and pick the best out at the end .

Thus ending my "easy tips to work around over-simplified tiny camera issues" for today .