Pictures Pictures Pictures

OldMan47

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A member here asked how I go about getting pictures so I thought I would let the cat out of the bag.

I must be the first to admit that I am only a hobby photographer. My pictures are mostly taken with a starter level digital SLR made by Nikon. I just use the wide range lens that came with the camera because specialist lenses are so darned expensive. My camera is a simple to operate D80 model. It is basically the same camera as a D40 but has some minor enhancements that I was willing to pay for.

Let's explore how I go about getting a picture. The first thing I do is back up a bit from the tank. I know full well that a closeup can be clearer than a distant picture but the focal distance is not quite as critical when you are 3 feet away as when you are only a foot away. Next, I use the mechanical zoom that my lens has, digital zoom is useless since I can use my picture editor later to crop the picture, which is all a digital zoom does. Now comes the really technical part, clean the darned glass so we are not trying to look through any algae or other distractions. A single water drop on the outside of the glass can ruin an otherwise brilliant picture. Glass on the tank, acrylic for people with expensive tanks, can reflect tons of light right back at your lens. There are two things you can do about that. The first is to take pictures with the room lights off and the tank lights on. That gets rid of most of the pictures of the photographer in the reflection. The next thing you can do is shoot at an angle so the flash is reflected off to one side, not back at your lens. Now start to think about the light you are seeing through your viewfinder, I never did get used to using a digital display instead. When my view shows me some shadowy fish with a light behind them, I need to wait for them to move before taking the picture. No amount of image correction can overcome a poorly lit subject with a bright background. You want to find your fish far enough behind the light source that they are well lit.

My technique may not work for everyone but one of the first physical things I do to the camera is turn off the auto focus. When I leave it turned on, I inevitably find it has focused perfectly on the glass or one of the background plants. So now you have a picture of me acting like I know how to do things and sitting in the dark in front of a lit tank, with one hand on the focus ring, my eye to the viewfinder and the other hand supporting the camera and poised to snap a shot. Now I watch the fish in the viewfinder and focus in and out as the fish move while trying to follow them around the tank. If they hesitate for even a moment, I shoot a picture. With no cost of developing film, I have no concerns about shooting 100 shots to get one or two worth having.

Once I have a few hundred shots of a few tanks in the camera memory, it is time for the next step. I dump all of the pictures into my PC and open each one to examine it. If it has promise, I try the auto-correct function. I seldom like the results but it tells me whether or not there is anything worth salvaging from the picture. If things look hopeful, I find my usual path to success is in adjusting only the brightness / color density of the picture. For me that means selecting the adjustment field that says mid-range only and adding 20 points or so to the value in the box. That almost always gives me an apparent exposure that I like. (I have no idea why the camera couldn't just always shoot 20 points brighter but it doesn't) The next step is dealing with the fact that the fish I wanted to shoot is off to one side or in a corner of the picture. I use the edit function again to crop the picture to what I had intended to shoot. If things are still going well, I resize the picture to a mere 800 x 600 picture before uploading it to photobucket. That way it doesn't blow out the forum sides where I post it and people with dial up only need to spend 2 or 3 minutes waiting for the picture to load. By this time the file is often less than a megabyte in size so it doesn't take forever to load. When I was done cropping it was often over 2 megabytes and when it has been properly enhanced and not yet cropped 5 or 6 megabytes is not unusual. The end result of all this manipulation is clear enough pictures for a screen display without a huge file that people need to open. A few examples of different situations:

How about a golden teddy male in action, at a full length of just over an inch, call it about 3 cm.
MaleCourt_640.jpg


Mow for a bit of a stretch. Let's try a newborn Limia perugia. At less than 1 cm long this was not an easy picture to get.
LimiaFry800.jpg


How about a bigger topic at about 20 feet, 6 meters, distance but using the zoom. A young harbor seal that I spotted on the beach.
HarborSeal800.jpg


A nice big fish for an example. How about a Herotilapia mutispinosa, rainbow cichlids, at a maximum size of 5 inches but most of these closer to about 4 inches. The plants in the picture are the tank background and some silk plants. There are never live plants in a tank with these vegetarians, they will not allow it.
6Rainbows800b.jpg


Now the smallest of those fish guarding some fry while displaying the black bottom half of the body, breeding colors. In the picture there are a few of the 0.5 cm fry that it is guarding. Try looking closely again, they are really there.
I never did get a decent picture of the adult with fry. Nobody would hold still for it and the adult kept moving the fry out of sight while I was trying to shoot.
MomAndChild2_800.jpg
 
Thats similar to what I do, but I don't mess with editing unless I have to for a sig or avatar. I use a panasonic FZ28. I normally don't should on auto, its like 50 custom and 50 on other things like close up or high speed. Clean glass and a dark room is really important. My camera does okay with tanks, shooting fish is really not an easy task.
 
I use an Olympus e-410 with a sigma lens.
My approach is similar although depending on what I'm trying to shoot I sometime take the pics right up against the glass. But I never use the flash when I'm taking pics unless I have too.
I was experimenting with the default underwater settings while taking pics but with no good outcome, all I got was blurry fish because the shutter was open to long which is a shame because the lighting was perfect.
What do you guys find best for getting a clear shot when they're always moving?
 
OM, have you thought about expanding your experiments a bit to include external flash? At the AGA conference I had any number of discussions with photographers about what they do when shooting tanks (and to a lesser extent, fish.) One technique is to set up two slave flash units a few feet out from each side of the tank. I got the impression that the ideal and most sophisticated way of doing this was to use slave flashes that have big white screens in front of them so that the momentary light is large but soft. Optional positions for adding a third and/or fourth flash are directly above the tank and (in the case of no background) behind the tank (although often this is just a light, not a flash and sometimes a diffuser is used.)

Obviously the side slave flashes could be those expensive wired or wireless things on stands with screens that photographic studios use and I believe are usually expensive. But I've been in discussions where people mentioned cheap slave flash units that simply respond and fire based on a photodetector sensing the light from the primary flash of the camera. I have no idea whether the response would be too delayed. At the conference there were photographers from the magazines and, in a pinch, what they were doing was to kneel on one knee and brace their camera elbow on that knee and hold a flash unit (they all had longish coil cords connected to their flash units) out over the top of the tank. (In all cases they had already removed any apparatus from the top of the subject tank.) But I think when not in a pinch, they use tripods. The tripods free up your hands to make adjustments to the slave flash units and then come back to the camera for a series of shots. Also they talked about just getting a small chair and sitting with the tripod pointing the camera at a good background spot and waiting for fish to be in it.

~~waterdrop~~
 
Thank you so much for this, OldMan47! There's a lot of really helpful hints here! I tried to get a few good picture of my platy and molly fry... here are a some of them... (there's too many to add on here! :D)

SDC12034.jpg


SDC11725-1.jpg


SDC11448.jpg


Also, just a question. What kind of platy is this? I got her a bit ago because she looked so lovely, but have no idea what kind she is. This picture was lucky, really. I didn't think it would be so clear, because she had snuck in from behind the babies floating box thing! She is cute, though!

SDC11493.jpg
 
OM, have you thought about expanding your experiments a bit to include external flash? At the AGA conference I had any number of discussions with photographers about what they do when shooting tanks (and to a lesser extent, fish.) One technique is to set up two slave flash units a few feet out from each side of the tank. I got the impression that the ideal and most sophisticated way of doing this was to use slave flashes that have big white screens in front of them so that the momentary light is large but soft. Optional positions for adding a third and/or fourth flash are directly above the tank and (in the case of no background) behind the tank (although often this is just a light, not a flash and sometimes a diffuser is used.)

Obviously the side slave flashes could be those expensive wired or wireless things on stands with screens that photographic studios use and I believe are usually expensive. But I've been in discussions where people mentioned cheap slave flash units that simply respond and fire based on a photodetector sensing the light from the primary flash of the camera. I have no idea whether the response would be too delayed. At the conference there were photographers from the magazines and, in a pinch, what they were doing was to kneel on one knee and brace their camera elbow on that knee and hold a flash unit (they all had longish coil cords connected to their flash units) out over the top of the tank. (In all cases they had already removed any apparatus from the top of the subject tank.) But I think when not in a pinch, they use tripods. The tripods free up your hands to make adjustments to the slave flash units and then come back to the camera for a series of shots. Also they talked about just getting a small chair and sitting with the tripod pointing the camera at a good background spot and waiting for fish to be in it.

~~waterdrop~~


At the local fish shows their are people with really nice cameras taking pics of the fish. Generally from what I've seen they have a black blanket that goes over the tank and photographer since the room is no dark this give a dark place to shoot from and stops reflections on the glass. They also have external flashes that they place on top of the tank so it flashes downward. I've never seen anyone use more then one external flash for fish, but I'm sure its probably been done somewhere.
 
for a faster shutter speed(for moving fish) crank the ISO up :good:
 
My main secret: A comfy chair about eye-level with the mid line of the tank. Just sit still and relax by whatever plant or rock you want in the picture with the fish (or just where the fish likes to hang out). The more you run around the tank, the more likely you are to either spook the fish or make them think they're getting fed. If you don't move much, eventually they'll go back to their normal business. Just sit and take as many shots as your memory card will hold, anything interesting you see going on. I rarely get the shot I want, but usually get something.

Turn off autofocus, too - some digital cameras will have a pretty noticeable delay after you push the button while it focuses, and that's more than enough to lose your fish.

I guarantee for every photo someone has of their fish there are about 10 others that are blurry

And for every clear photo somebody has of the fish they actually wanted, they have 10 more clear super closeups of a danio or rainbow fish that dashed into the shot at the last second. Particularly annoying when you wait 20 minutes for a skittish fish to cooperate only to have your one chance of the day ruined by a random little fish. Taking a picture of a specific fish in a mixed community is almost a lost cause some days.
 
Hey, this is a topic I can actually contribute to! I may be a newbie when it comes to fish keeping but I know my stuff about photography. I own and run a UK mail order photographic accessory business and I'm an avid semi-pro photographer.

Whilst I have never really bothered photographing fish in an aquarium I can still offer some advice:

1. The lower end cameras will struggle when it comes to autofocus so in that case switch it off and focus manually wherever possible. The higher end cameras with good lenses will focus quickly and accurately.

2. Aquariums are relatively dark subjects compared to outdoor photography so use a relatively wide aperture if you have that option (f4 or below). If you're still struggling to freeze the motion of the fish, start increasing the ISO

3. Avoid using flash unless you can use off-camera flash. On camera flash will just cause nasty reflections from the glass. The corded flashguns you see the pros using will be dedicated TTL flashguns (which can be expensive) attached to the camera via a TTL flash cord. This means you can position the flashgun anywhere off camera and the camera will work out the correct exposure and control the amount of light the flashgun outputs. This eliminates reflections from the glass.

4. Instead of a TTL cord and a dedicated flashgun you can use a cheap flashgun with an optical slave trigger (like waterdrop mentioned). This will require a bit of trial and error to get the correct exposure.

5. Remember that the longer your focal length (the more you zoom in) the more critical focus becomes. You can combat this by using a narrower aperture (higher f stop number) but you will lose light and may need to increase the ISO even more which reduces quality.

So, if you only have access to a digital compact camera, turn off the flash, get as much light into the aquarium as possible, use the widest aperture (lowest f number) and start shooting. Use bright white card around your tank to help reflect more light into the aquarium.

If you have a DSLR with a separate flashgun, try getting the flash off the camera or tilt it up to the ceiling to bounce the light back down into the tank. This will eliminate reflections.

If you need any more advice just let me know.

In the meantime, as I don't have any fish photos, here's a few of my other wildlife shots... :rolleyes:

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4640145714_dc4e753563.jpg
 
Hey, this is a topic I can actually contribute to! I may be a newbie when it comes to fish keeping but I know my stuff about photography. I own and run a UK mail order photographic accessory business and I'm an avid semi-pro photographer.

Whilst I have never really bothered photographing fish in an aquarium I can still offer some advice:

1. The lower end cameras will struggle when it comes to autofocus so in that case switch it off and focus manually wherever possible. The higher end cameras with good lenses will focus quickly and accurately.

2. Aquariums are relatively dark subjects compared to outdoor photography so use a relatively wide aperture if you have that option (f4 or below). If you're still struggling to freeze the motion of the fish, start increasing the ISO

3. Avoid using flash unless you can use off-camera flash. On camera flash will just cause nasty reflections from the glass. The corded flashguns you see the pros using will be dedicated TTL flashguns (which can be expensive) attached to the camera via a TTL flash cord. This means you can position the flashgun anywhere off camera and the camera will work out the correct exposure and control the amount of light the flashgun outputs. This eliminates reflections from the glass.

4. Instead of a TTL cord and a dedicated flashgun you can use a cheap flashgun with an optical slave trigger (like waterdrop mentioned). This will require a bit of trial and error to get the correct exposure.

5. Remember that the longer your focal length (the more you zoom in) the more critical focus becomes. You can combat this by using a narrower aperture (higher f stop number) but you will lose light and may need to increase the ISO even more which reduces quality.

So, if you only have access to a digital compact camera, turn off the flash, get as much light into the aquarium as possible, use the widest aperture (lowest f number) and start shooting. Use bright white card around your tank to help reflect more light into the aquarium.

If you have a DSLR with a separate flashgun, try getting the flash off the camera or tilt it up to the ceiling to bounce the light back down into the tank. This will eliminate reflections.

If you need any more advice just let me know.


where was the two tigers taken? any disscount offers to the people of TFF :good: :lol:
 
where was the two tigers taken? any disscount offers to the people of TFF :good: :lol:


Out of the above photographs, only the tiger shot was taken in captivity. The rest were shot in the wild (including the bears). The tiger shot was taken at the Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig, Scotland. Luckily it had been snowing and it made the shot so much better.

Discount for TFF members? Yes, I think we could certainly arrange something. I'm not sure if the forum rules allow me to discuss such things on here. Is there a ban on advertising?
 
where was the two tigers taken? any disscount offers to the people of TFF :good: :lol:


Out of the above photographs, only the tiger shot was taken in captivity. The rest were shot in the wild (including the bears). The tiger shot was taken at the Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig, Scotland. Luckily it had been snowing and it made the shot so much better.

Discount for TFF members? Yes, I think we could certainly arrange something. I'm not sure if the forum rules allow me to discuss such things on here. Is there a ban on advertising?

wow the bears are a great shot then!, and you didnt run from the big male im asuming they was running from!

im keen on wildlife photography myself, wouldnt say im the best as only really picked up a camera this year, but im happy with some of my results. cant get enough of snapping birds at the mo.

Copy2ofbirchmere088.jpg



Copyofbirchmere038.jpg


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