qwuintus: Who needs an ant farm when you have critters like this in your tank.
Ehydo: Yes, having a 4', 10" diameter skimmer helps.
That and 75 - 100-micron filter socks, a 25-micron canister filter and turning off all the current in the tank at photo time.
The camera, once again
is a Canon EOS Digital Rebel with the 100mm maro lens.
ReeferNOOB: I use Photoshop CS2. My usual procedure is to first crop the image as needed and then I use Auto Levels which adjusts pretty much everything such as contrast, brightness, color balance, etcetera. 90% of the time, this gets it right as seen by my eyes. If needed, I will then use the Shadow/Highlight feature that allows brightness to be brought up some in the darker areas and tones down the over-bright areas. Then I use the Unsharp Mask feature that allows a slight sharpening of just the portions of the image that are already sharp and leaves unsharp areas as they are. You have to get the focus right from the beginning for this to work well. Then I resize the image to 780-pixels wide. If there is any real obvious and bothersome captured particles, I use the Healing Brush feature to attempt to remove them. Some photos have no need for this while others may have several spots requiring this cleanup tool. Finally, I add a 20-pixel border to the image, usually black unless there is a large area of black in the image at the edges. In this case, I add a 4-pixel color picked from the image followed by a 16-pixel black border, totaling 20-pixels.
The ultimate goal is to use as low a level as possible with these tools despite the initial urge to do more. It's easy to make a photo worse by adding to much despite urges to "add" to or improve upon the photo. In addition, the old saying that "you can't polish a turd" applies here as well.
But, this is the beauty of the digital medium. Take lots of photos and find (hopefully) several great shots.
Joseph
gcatalfo at verizon dot net. Thanks man!! Keep it up!
