Pretty Picture from Phuket

We were so busy shooting video, talking and eating during our trip to Phuket and the Similan Islands that I didn’t have much time to take photos. I did, however, take a Sony DSC-T77 compact camera in for a few dives.

As many of you know, taking underwater photos with a compact camera can be a challenge, since compacts don’t have as much flexibility and the choice of add-ons that you can get with an SLR. In fact, I generally don’t have high expectations of photos I take with compact cameras, especially when I don’t have external strobes, wide-angle adapters and such…as was the case with the T77 I had.

So I was pleasantly surprised to get this photo of butterflyfish (Chaetodon collare). I used the underwater mode to help bring out colours (a topic I’ve discussed in greater detail previously on my blog), but other than that, all I had was the camera and the standard housing.

Pretty portrait, taken with a compact camera

Obviously, it took a bit of patience waiting for the fish to line up, but I guess the take-away message from this image is that you don’t always need to have expensive kit to get nice photos.