capturing beamprofile backscatter dimlight with non-SLR digital possible?

night.hoodie

Enlightened
Joined
Aug 6, 2014
Messages
717
Location
Lost City of Atlanta
Before they started putting cameras into knives and forks, and fingernails and microwaves and very cleverly hidden in any sear pin, I was taking pictures in the dark with film.

Depending on what action, or clarity, depth of field, I wanted to capture, I could telescope, adjust aperture, shutterspeed, and choice of film, and ISO settings. I miss it. Due to my economy then, most of my work was B&W, self-developed lots of film in a can in a lightroom/darkbag, and made hardly any prints because that's when it got expensive, for photo-paper. Wasted paper on contact sheets. I thought that was a good idea. WASTED. Should rather have made prints. I still cherish the ones I did make. When I got a little more dough, I moved to color, gave up self-developing, fell in love with saturation and positive slide film, the control positive gives you, but in negative film lost the freedom you have when making choices with composing your own prints.

I am happy I still have a nice Nikon SLR, and that great negative & positive 35mm film still exists, should I need to compose somthing or be inspired. I do not have a digital SLR. I'm not using film anymore.

I take a lot of photos with digital non-SLR, the kind of cams that are in everything else.


In digital we have so many gains... I took a picture of a constellation with my phone.

But, without SLR control of shutterspeed and aperture, are there techniques to get back the control of what I want to do in the dark, subtle light, with the touch-screen white-point auto-adjust screen-tapping?


I want to take some pictures of the backscatter of flashlight beam profiles in different medium/air.
With film, I could do this wonderfully. I don't have the reasources.

Any new techniques discovered with the awesome supercameras ineveryphone to capture something this subtle, as the smokey beam profile of a flashlight, showing the profile of the hotspot from a lateral position, as well as the spill?
 

TEEJ

Flashaholic
Joined
Jan 12, 2012
Messages
7,490
Location
NJ
There are some better point and shoot (NOT SLR) that are digital, and allow manual override of aperture and shutter speed, ISO, white balance, etc.

Even the SLR have a screen anyway, and most use the screen to compose their shots instead of the viewfinder unless there's a lot of light behind you/glare, etc.

That might be a compromise.

Back in the 70's for example, I too had a darkroom, and did B&W, shooting stock photos, API/UPI, etc. The control over the picture with the shot settings combined with the dark room treatments gave a lot of options, but, a digital camera and photoshop, etc...is more powerful and easier, not to mention essentially free on a per pic basis. :D
 

AnAppleSnail

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Aug 21, 2009
Messages
4,200
Location
South Hill, VA
CHDK (Canon Hacker's Developer Kit) gives you some SLR-type controls to a lot of mid-range Canon point-and-shoots. Some of their $150 superzooms can be used with it to get pretty good camera control for long exposures. Cheaper than a DSLR kit.
 
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