I'm starting this thread for a purpose, to show that you can take very good quality pictures to remember your trip by, without breaking the bank on expensive camera equipment. The photos I'm posting here are not magazine quality. But some of them are very nice and even the lesser quality ones will be great to look at for years to come. The camera I used was an Olympus Stylus 600 (2005 compact point and shoot model) with a standard housing and NO strobe. This camera and all of the equipment (housing, 3 batteries, a 2GB card, and various other small items cost me less than $180 on ebay.)

I took a 2 hour class from my LDS, learned how to use all of the advanced settings on the camera (exposure level, white balance, ISO, etc.) and practiced with it quite a bit topside before I used it underwater.

A couple of caveats: The original pictures were taken at a large resolution and a very high quality setting on the camera. Due to the rules of this board, the pictures have been reduced in size by about 75% and in many cases the quality had to be reduced as well to get them under the 100kb limit. So you can probably add a couple measures of asthetic value to all of them if you were viewing them in original format. Hope you like them. I love them and I'm very very happy with what I got for what I paid and for the ease I was able to do so (size, weight, complexity of equipment, etc.) Also, this was my first time ever taking pictures underwater and I was often the most experienced of four new divers in our family so my attention was divided with the priority being on the safety of my family. So a lot of problems with angle, composition, etc. I accept those issues for the sake of safety.

Hope you enjoy these! I'll make this a multi-thread post to reduce the pictures per post.
























(Message edited by herk_man on January 5, 2010)

(Message edited by herk_man on January 5, 2010)

Wow, some great shots in there Eric! Thanks for sharing Cool tip on cost/value ratio too.

More pictures: (I should also add that many of these pictures were taken by my 16 year old son with just a brief amount of instruction on the advanced settings. By the end of the trip I was fighting him for camera time! So much fun!)

And as always, the closer the subject to the lens (no zoom) the better shot is likely to turn out.

Round 3! I put all of these on a DVD set to Bob Marley and Jimmy Buffet music. I so need to go back!


















































































Hope you enjoyed the pics and hope, if you've avoided photography because of the cost:quality ratio, this shows you it can still be done cheaply.

Very nice pictures Eric.
Thank you for taking the time of posting them.

" I took a 2 hour class from my LDS".
What is LDS please?

Great photos that I would be thrilled to take.
My husband and have the Sealife 1000 and didn't have very good luck last year on St. Croix. Our fault not the camera. LOL

LDS=Local Dive Shop

Great photos Eric

Thanks. Not to say I don't wish I could have pics just a little crisper (really need strobes to eliminate backscatter) but for me, this is a great compromise between good memories and not a lot of hassle. I certainly understand that some people want to take the absolute best pics they can and really get into the hobby. I do the same with other things in my life. But I just don't dive enough to justify the expense or the hassle.

So this setup along with some good tips on using the finer settings of the camera gets me right where I need to be (and a little help from Photoshop after I get home doesn't hurt!)

e.