bubbletip2
Premium Member
I wanted to start a new thread to share my experience with taking photos of Mike Leonard's TOTM for September yesterday afternoon. I have been making photos of reef tanks for five years now and have been extremely frustrated with any tank I had shot. I don't feel that way anymore after shooting Mike's tank under 12K Reeflux bulbs.
The qoute below was taken from one of my posts from this thread:
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1140629&perpage=25&pagenumber=11
"I think the area in tank photography that effects your success the most is the types of lights that are used. Without good lighting, photographs can look as unnatural as the Simpsons. Light is everything. I have never felt shooting under variuos 10K bulbs and especially 14K(what I have at home now) and 20K bulbs ever produced natural photos right out of the camera. You really have to work heavily with white balance and color channels to get anything close to natural. The coral, the rock, the corraline, and the fish just don't look like what you see when you are there in front of the tank. That is not the tanks fault. You know how it looks in front of your tank, but your camera has a s**t load of trouble trying to figure it out. Most 10K's will blow out highlights in your shots and blues look so unnatural that the majority of the shots I just throw away."
I have never before been able to get near accurate photos right out of the camera with any other bulb but the Reeflux 12K. I would like to go into more detail about this later because depending upon the content of the photo in regards to contrast of colors, where the bulb is in respect to the camera, and the range of highlight to shadow, it is still possible to get strange color effects even from this 12K bulb.
However, as I stated previously I have never been able to get such accurate color for the majority of any session with any tank up until now.
I am going to add a little teaser of a top down shot to give you an idea of where I am coming from. In the middle of this photo you will recognize a lime green monti cap. Mike had pointed this coral out to me explaining that this color can sometimes be hard to find. It is so lime green in person you would not beleive it. Most green monti's I have encountered have a darker hue and I think Mike will agree with me that he feels the same. The point here is that when you look at this photo there are other green and blu-green corals that would look pretty awkward if I were to turn the lime green channel up to show off this monti. It is just not possible to do without effecting the majority of the rest of the photo being the green and blue-green stags.
Another thing to be understood is that when taking pictures of tanks it is unlikely to shoot any shots with anything but ISO400 or higher. Most of what I had to shoot was ISO 800 in order to get a fast enough shutter speed to keep from camera shake. This is without flash of course. I just feel that flash shots lose the natural look of what was seen in the tank. In shooting higher sensitivities, it is very likely that you will introduce color noise effects and chromatic abberations especially in the darker areas of a photo. This is something everyone deals with when trying to make a picture brighter than the original exposure. This is not the greatest shot I took yesterday but simply a good example of what I am trying to explain.
Again, the excitement I felt when I started taking pictures was how much easier it was for me to get great pictures out of the camera with minimal correction of exposure, sharpness, and highlight/shadow tools to mimic exactly what I saw when I looked down into Mike's tank under 12K Reeflux bulbs.
I will have a few more pics to come. This one should get us started to understanding the relationship between the light of our bulbs and the impact on digital cameras that we use today.
The qoute below was taken from one of my posts from this thread:
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1140629&perpage=25&pagenumber=11
"I think the area in tank photography that effects your success the most is the types of lights that are used. Without good lighting, photographs can look as unnatural as the Simpsons. Light is everything. I have never felt shooting under variuos 10K bulbs and especially 14K(what I have at home now) and 20K bulbs ever produced natural photos right out of the camera. You really have to work heavily with white balance and color channels to get anything close to natural. The coral, the rock, the corraline, and the fish just don't look like what you see when you are there in front of the tank. That is not the tanks fault. You know how it looks in front of your tank, but your camera has a s**t load of trouble trying to figure it out. Most 10K's will blow out highlights in your shots and blues look so unnatural that the majority of the shots I just throw away."
I have never before been able to get near accurate photos right out of the camera with any other bulb but the Reeflux 12K. I would like to go into more detail about this later because depending upon the content of the photo in regards to contrast of colors, where the bulb is in respect to the camera, and the range of highlight to shadow, it is still possible to get strange color effects even from this 12K bulb.
However, as I stated previously I have never been able to get such accurate color for the majority of any session with any tank up until now.
I am going to add a little teaser of a top down shot to give you an idea of where I am coming from. In the middle of this photo you will recognize a lime green monti cap. Mike had pointed this coral out to me explaining that this color can sometimes be hard to find. It is so lime green in person you would not beleive it. Most green monti's I have encountered have a darker hue and I think Mike will agree with me that he feels the same. The point here is that when you look at this photo there are other green and blu-green corals that would look pretty awkward if I were to turn the lime green channel up to show off this monti. It is just not possible to do without effecting the majority of the rest of the photo being the green and blue-green stags.
Another thing to be understood is that when taking pictures of tanks it is unlikely to shoot any shots with anything but ISO400 or higher. Most of what I had to shoot was ISO 800 in order to get a fast enough shutter speed to keep from camera shake. This is without flash of course. I just feel that flash shots lose the natural look of what was seen in the tank. In shooting higher sensitivities, it is very likely that you will introduce color noise effects and chromatic abberations especially in the darker areas of a photo. This is something everyone deals with when trying to make a picture brighter than the original exposure. This is not the greatest shot I took yesterday but simply a good example of what I am trying to explain.
Again, the excitement I felt when I started taking pictures was how much easier it was for me to get great pictures out of the camera with minimal correction of exposure, sharpness, and highlight/shadow tools to mimic exactly what I saw when I looked down into Mike's tank under 12K Reeflux bulbs.
I will have a few more pics to come. This one should get us started to understanding the relationship between the light of our bulbs and the impact on digital cameras that we use today.
