Photography on a budget

Ive been really enjoying photography lately since upgrading to a DSLR, but thought trying the old point and shoot with the overhead flashes.

Just wanted to show that decent photos can be taken without an expensive DSLR camera and flash gear.

Shopping list:

Point and shoot camera.

Jessops flash, any flash with a slave mode should work with any camera with a flash, even a mobile phone camera.
Some of the cheaper slave flashes are as little as £29.

Grease proof paper, to help diffuse and spread the light more.

The following photos were taken very quickly with just my hand covering the onboard flash and only one flash. The slaves are very sensitive and only a small amount of flash should trigger the slaves. With experimentation, better photos will certainly be taken given more time and patience.

The point and shoot camera i used has some decent manual control, no where near as good as a DSLR, but could be used to effect.

Aperture only goes to f8, not ideal as with the D90 i usually shoot between f16/20.

Shutter speed 1/200 1/320 was the fastest i shot at.

ISO 100, 200

This photo came out well over exposed, mainly because of the settings
Aperture f4 ISO 200.



Needed to open the aperture up more fully, which is only f8 on this camera. Still over exposed



Cranked down the ISO to 100 and seemed to work ok. Photos could certainly benifit with post processing.







A point and shoot certainly won't be better than DSLR. Auto focus is a pain with the point and shoot and just the sheer lack of proper manual control that you get with DSLR will certainly limit any creativity.

Photos quality were just a little flat, again something that post processing could sort out.

But with a overhead flash, at least you can capture you true colours of the fish instead of washed out front flash photography. Or waiting for your fish to keep still with no flash photography.

These were taken in a 2 ft deep tank and the light the flash outputs was certainly adequate enough.

Just remember:
Clean the glass first
Turn off/down filter (optional)
Make sure there are no light pollution to reflect onto the tank. Turn off the lights from tv's or other aquariums in the room.