A selection of
useful tidbits of information for the aquarist. Readers are
encouraged to send their tips to terry@advancedaquarist.com or
to post them to our Hot Tips sticky in the Reefs.org General Reefkeeping Discussion forum for possible
publication. Next month's Hot Tip theme will be "Getting
Rid of your Excess Coral Frags".
Some people are new at getting rid of their excess coral
growth and it would benefit them to find out how to work
out deals with their LFS, etc.
Aquarium Photography Tips
Make sure you have
a good macro lense if you are shooting for little critters.
Sometime I need to get closer than one inch to get
a good pic.
Watch for the flash's reflection on the front
glass if you use one. I can ruin your pic.
Try to shoot straight
instead of at an angle. The acrylic and glass will give
noticeable chromatic abrasion (blue and red outline around
a white object, for example) if you don't look straight.
Use a tripod if
you have long exposure time, a remote shutter release
will help even more.
White balance can make a big difference
if you can't get good color representation. Flash can
give everything a yellowish look since more flash are around
4000K.
It
make a good portion of an evening if you are photographing
a fish. They are more difficult to pose than 4 toddlers
who love to cry.
Keep a camera handy for that once-in-a-life-time
shot! Ooops, dead batteries.
The best time to take pic
can be when everyone is sleeping.... when the light is
off, and your reef make take on a very different look.
-- Reef Box Etc
If you aren't using a tripod, try to take a shot
with timer mode. My Canon SD 300 has a 2 second timer option,
so it doesn't take a picture for 2 seconds until after I depress
the shutter button. It's a lot easier to hold a camera still
when you aren't pushing down on a button.
-- reefkeeper1
Clean your glass/acrylic both inside and out
before taking your shots.
Turn off your pumps before taking your shots - it well
prevent your subject from getting blown around and it will
help stop any particulate matter from floating in front of
your lens.
-- Righty
Using an external
flash for pictures of fish is a very useful thing. Capturing
an image of a fast moving fish requires a flash period, however,
most camera mounted flashes will blow your brightness out of
the water (so to speak).
-- D. Wade Lehmann (aka 'wade')
My
best advice is to take LOTS of pics. Have a lot of space on
your card and be patient and just keep clicking away. This
is especially important when trying to take pics of fish. Often
I will take 20 pictures of a single fish before I get the one
that I really want. And often the one that you think was good
turns out to have some distracting plumbing output or something
when you go to process it so you need to have several that
you are happy with before you even start processing them.
Speaking of processing it, that is an important aspect. Use
a good photo software to resize and do other minor touch ups.
No one wants to see you post a 2,560x1,980 pixel image on a
bulletin board. I use adobe photoshop and use the auto-adjust
feature on 90% of my pics. Also once you resize you need to
do an unsharp mask on it.
-- Nathan Paden (aka 'npaden')
Use
Crop. Zoom out a little for better focus/faster shutter
... and crop the final image down before resizing it down
to screen size.
Use a tripod. Turn off the room lights, close curtains
if back-lit.
Consider shutting off pumps temporarily, to shoot macro
of corals without flow-related blurring.
Shoot straight on, especially when close, to avoid distortion
off the glass.
-- middletonmark
If
you are running windows xp you can get a really cool powertoy
called "image resizer": http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx .
It is a small program, easy to use and you can resize multiple
pics all at once. just pick on all your pics you want resized
then right click and pick the size you would like them all
to be.
-- radar!
If
you found this article worthwhile, help support future
AAOLM publications with your generous contribution.
