Taking a good picture of the tank/fishes

yhbae

yhbae

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Aug 5, 2003
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For those who consitently take good quality pictures of your tanks, how do you do it?

I have a Canon A70 digital camera, which is a 3 mega pixel camera. It takes great pictures on just about everything except what's in the tank... :D

So far, I must have taken over 300 shots, and I have about 2 that I can recognize clearly which fish it was. The rest was garbage.

I tried:
- Macro mode (with auto and manual focus)
- Sports mode (for shorter shutter time)
- with and without flash
- with and without red-eye reduction
- Zoom from further back (dunno what I was thinking when I did this - probably got desparate... :D )
- During the day and night with aquarium light on.

There must be something I'm missing here... please help! :confused:
 
I've been having trouble with the A70, too...I think it's just taking a whole bunch of no flash pictures and getting lucky.
 
A tripod helps a lot along with strong lighting and never zooming in unless absolutely necessary.

Here are a couple of Pictures I've taken with my A70.

http://adkins.dynip.com/forum/30-gallon-crypt-22-jul-2003.jpg

http://adkins.dynip.com/forum/corydoras-schwartzi-7-6-2003.jpg

Obviously fish are harder than plants. When you want to take pictures of fish you have to setup where you want to take the picture of the fish and then hold the button halfway down to focus and then wait for the fish to swim into the picture and then snap it off. I usually delete 9 out of 10 pictures I take trying to get good ones of fish.

Alex
 
Man, that looks so much better than what I have managed so far... :D

Sounds like the best advice I have so far is be patient and outwait the fishes until they come to your view - I'll try that...

Thank you for the advice!
 
I second Alex's suggestions. First, a tripod is practically essential. No matter how hard you try, you just can't hold a camera steady enough. Also, patience. You can't follow your fish around, you must wait for the fish to come into view and anticipate when that will be miliseconds before they make it there. Something like corys are definitely easier. Trying to get a photo of a zebra danio is very hard. I found I liked the colours in the pictures without a flash better, but then the fish have to stay still that much longer.
 
The Canon A-70 is better than my Olympus!

I wonder what's going on with the poor pictures?? :confused:
 
Make sure your image quality is set to max and take pretty "wide" shots, then edit/crop them later... no flash either, that causes grief with the auto exposure and focus because of the glass.

Having the image quality set to max gives you the largest picture, which will allow you to crop and still retain the image quality if the cropped photo then needs to be enlarged some.
 
It was set at the max resolution that the camera can go. I did in fact take many shots further away, hoping that there will be enough pixels used for fishes but had no luck there either - still blurry...

I do have a black background, and I noticed that the close-up pictures taken from the front is vastly different compare to the one taken from the side... Side ones have more natural look overall, but fishes come out real dark. The frontal shots give better fish colors and definitions but everything else looks a bit messy... Hmm...
 
May need to photoshop the images a little, it's rare I don't have to sharpen my digicam photos even a small amount.
 
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