It depends on what you want to spend and how much fun you want to have. I have several but my favorite is my little Olympus 850 SW. It is a 8 megapixel, waterproof, shock resistent, fun camera with a 4x optical zoom, plus a tight LED lite for super close macro shots. It will fit in your pocket and with a 1gig card you can take 800+ high res pictures easy. The fun thing about it is you don't have to be careful with it, it works great underwater, and it has so many factory pre-settings you don't have to think about what your shooting. If you want to you can custom set all your normal funtions like the bigger models, but this camera is for rough and tumble fun on the fly stuff, with a quite slow take your time side too. It cost around $250 but is worth it and it won't break if you drop it. You can buy cameras for less but they won't be worth it, and this one will help you decide if you want to spend $400 or more for a really nice camera to take photography more seriously(plus $100+ per lens). Of course this is only my personal opion but all the photos you see in my albums of my children or myself were taken with this camera. It also comes with great software, has a built in flashlight, clock, and takes movies.