hi every one,i am very interested in breeding tropical fish and selling them on my website but my photos are not to good evan though the camera is a s9600 and takes lovley photos of everything else thanks chris

What's happening with them?

 

The main problems you will have is that you are taking through glass and you can't use the flash cos it will screw up your photo and you will get reflections. Therefore your photos will be dark, It shouldn't distort though.

 

The other problem of course is that fish move, so you will need a very fast shutter speed, but this lets even less light in.

 

I have no idea how the pro's do it (but a quick search turned up this: Fish Photography) however I have a managed through luck I guess to get a couple of reasonable fish-photos with my £100 point-and-shoot digicam. They are dark but photoshop cleans up quite reasonably.

 

Hope this helps.

My advice (from my limited photography skills) is to make sure you have plenty of light on the fish (either inside or outside the tank), which will allow you to not use the flash - using the flash would reflect off the glass and give you a horrid photo.

 

If you turn every other light off in the room and put a black or dark cloth/sheet in the background (behind the tank), you should be able to cut out the stuff in the background of your room. Another way to help this effect would be to use a large aperture, that way the background will be blurry, but the fish would stay sharp.

 

Eris was correct about using a fast shutter speed to capture the fast moving fish, so this makes it even more important to have the tank well lit from the outside.

 

Let us know how you get on.

Yes, you'll probably need a good non flash light source but make sure the fish aren't disturbed by it.

Yeah, definitely avoid things like strobes, I'm not sure the fish like dancing

 

If you keep the lights a fair distance from the tank, you should avoid blinding them. You could always cover the light with tissue paper to diffuse it even more.

thank you i will try this weekend to do a beeter job of my photography

diffused light from above give he best results

Turn off the lights in the room when taking photos of fish or whole aquariums. Same goes for televisions and blinds(if it is daytime). They will reflect off the glass and it can be hard to eliminate them because you will be moving around the tank.

 

When taking photos of the whole tank, you should definitely switch off the room lights and use a tripod if you have one. If not a tall table to rest the camera on will do just as good. A great tip is to use the '10 second delay' you get with most cameras, this will eliminate camera shake as you press the shutter.

 

Feed the fish beforehand, not while taking the pictures. Then the fish will be out and about looking for more food, but wont look as though they are gasping at the surface.

 

If your tank is planted , you can turn off the filter with great caution for a few moments allowing the plants to stop swaying or bending in the flow. Do not forget to switch it back on immediately otherwise you will have great pics of dead fish.

 

 

Use the cameras 'Macro' mode if available. This allows you to take pics of close objects with sharp focus by using a very large aperture. It appears as a 'flower' symbol on most cameras, the landscape mode is opposite, it uses a small aperture to get huge areas of distant objects or scenery in focus at the same time. This is usually shown up as a 'mountain' symbol.

 

If you are using flash, angle the camera sideways or down wards so the flash does not reflect straight back into the camera. Its OK if it is visible around the edges as you can trim this out later. Don't angle it up wards as it may reflect off the water surface. The lights in the hood may cause the exposure to be set incorrectly also. Someone once told me you can also cover the flash with a thin piece of tissue paper.

 

Hope some of this helps

good post