Thanks nm. I use a Fuji finepix s3000. Nothing really fancy but it takes some decent shots. Some are with flash some without. The cleaner photo was in macro and it makes it easy cause it is right on the other side of the glass. I am not much of a photography guy so I am not sure what settings do what. I pretty much just fill up the card, load em on the cpu and see what I got. And jakebtc, yeah I am embarassed to say but my front glass is that dirty. I made the mistake of putting the rockwork and some shrooms and such so close to the front glass it really bothers them to scrape it off. Some of my rocks are so close a small magfloat won't even fit in there. Oh well, I guess that since all my specimens seem happy and are thriving, appearance is secondary to that.