How To Take Quality Photos Of Your Fish.

[Boids-n-more]

If your shooting with a digital slr you can use a macro lens with a hood and put the hood right up to the glass. That will prevent flashback from the glass. You could also use a diffuser or an omni bouce to keep from getting that direct blast of light. 2 main things can make your pic look grainy , the wrong iso and noise. The higher the f-stop you use the longer your shutter needs needs to be open to let enough light in. To the original poster nice job.

 

[raptorrex]

If your shooting with a digital slr you can use a macro lens with a hood and put the hood right up to the glass. That will prevent flashback from the glass. You could also use a diffuser or an omni bouce to keep from getting that direct blast of light. 2 main things can make your pic look grainy , the wrong iso and noise. The higher the f-stop you use the longer your shutter needs needs to be open to let enough light in. To the original poster nice job.

macro lenses are the way to go, but if we are talking true macro, not these zoom things they call macro. you will need quite expensive extra gear, to give even illumination at such close distances, you will need a ring flash, or something similar. these have to be mounted right on the end of the lens! close focus lenses, the zoom jobs they call macro, are a different thing, you need to be nowwnere near as close to your subject, with these. if you can get yur flash flush with the side of yur tank, it makes no difference what angle your camera is, you will get no flash back.

and for the life of me i cant see what shutter speeds have to do with pictures taken with flash?? true the sutter speeds for flash is normaly set to a standard speed, this is to avoid the shutter being seen in the picture, but if you set a lower speed, it will have no effect on your picture. flashes fire at any thing up to 500,000 of a second, whatever speed you set, within reason, it will not be noticed, as the flash has frozen the motion anyway.
you can use what is called slow sync, this is a short low power burst from the flash, this freezes static objests in the picture, then the shutter will stay open allowing the ambient light to add it effects. but unless you want a lovley pic of your tank, and just a wooly blur where yur fish are, it is not a technique that has use in an aquarium.

 

[Miss Wiggle]

good stuff, one comment i don't like people using imageshack

plenty of people will not quite fathom how to get the actual image on the post and end up putting links up. if you click the links you get a zillion pop up's and as I'm at work I've no way to turn pop up blocker on and stop them. I'm sure other people have the same problem, I use and recommend photobucket as you don't get the same pop ups

 

[raptorrex]

good stuff, one comment i don't like people using imageshack

plenty of people will not quite fathom how to get the actual image on the post and end up putting links up. if you click the links you get a zillion pop up's and as I'm at work I've no way to turn pop up blocker on and stop them. I'm sure other people have the same problem, I use and recommend photobucket as you don't get the same pop ups

very interesting point. do any other members suffer from this?

 

[mark.w.jones]

If they post a hyper link rather than the actual photo, then they haven't done what I said originally which is to copy and paste the bit from hotlinks for forums 1 into their post. I only use imageshack as it is very easy to post a photo quickly but in fairness I haven't ever used photo bucket.

If your shooting with a digital slr you can use a macro lens with a hood and put the hood right up to the glass. That will prevent flashback from the glass. You could also use a diffuser or an omni bouce to keep from getting that direct blast of light. 2 main things can make your pic look grainy , the wrong iso and noise. The higher the f-stop you use the longer your shutter needs needs to be open to let enough light in. To the original poster nice job.

Thankyou

 

[Boids-n-more]

I shoot slr and thats what i'm talking about is true macro lenses. Like the cannon 10mm f 2.8 macro , thats a sweet lens. The ring flash is great i haven't actually got one yet , just spent 2000 dollors starting my conversion from film to digital.

 

[noshybabs]

this is my attempt, ISO 50 with a defuser (kitchen roll).

The light at the back is a mirror i have behind the tank, i think im gonna get a nice glossy back ground instead.

 

[noshybabs]

this is my attempt, ISO 50 with a defuser (kitchen roll).

The light at the back is a mirror i have behind the tank, i think im gonna get a nice glossy back ground instead.

I found this thread extreamly usfull and i spent sages trying to find it, Could we clean it up and make it sticky? or stick it somewhere easy it find?

 

[mea_caroro]

I've found with my digital camera, with limited exposure control, that I can get pretty good closeups of my fish by putting one or two layers of tissue (kleenex type) over the flash to get the benefits of the flash stopping the motion of the fish, but avoid that washed out look. I also get the lens right up close to the tank (using the macro option), The tissue has really helped a lot. And I agree - take a ton of pics and you may get one or more that are really good.

I think I'll try that now! If I dont have the flash on every thing looks really crappy, but I'll try this, maybe I'll be able to get good pics of my guppy fry.

 

[mark.w.jones]

Forgot I'd written this about a million years ago. What I will say, is that I now use photobucket and not imageshack for uploading photos for forums. Once you've registered its a much more user friendly and versatile site for adding photos easily. It also allows you to easily select multiple (20+) images in one drag and uploads them all at once. The only time consuming thing is copying and pasting each IMG code into your post on the forum so that it shows each picture directly.

 

[mark.w.jones]

I found this thread extreamly usfull and i spent sages trying to find it, Could we clean it up and make it sticky? or stick it somewhere easy it find?

Unfortunately I was a bit slow and hadn't realised that some git already had a pinned article on photographing fish in the members aquariums and pictures forum 4 years before I wrote mine (I think mine is better incedently). I live in hope that by bumping it up the forum every year that someone might take pity on me and have a mod pin it.