Actinic Tank Shooting...

[RevHtree]

I love how awesome a tank looks with just actinics but I can't see to get a good pic with just the actinics on. I am running VHO's for this and was wondering if you guys had some tips.

I keep taking pics but the blue washes out and bleeds. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

 

[jwedehase]

I've had the best luck when underexposing pretty drastically. The colors still don't come out as the eye sees them, but my experience is that the blues are the first to over expose and blast out, so a couple stops of underexposure tends to take some of that sting away. Here are a couple from my tank, under 4x39w T5 actinic.

 

[RevHtree]

Thanks for the advice and awesome pics!

The up close and macros are not that tough, but the FTS is what I am really struggling with.

 

[jwedehase]

Oh yeah! I've never had any decent luck with those. My old tank didn't have actinic supplementation, but the new one does. I just haven't had enough time with the camera in front of the lights. I'll experiment some, so I can learn more myself.

Oh! Another help for me was in Photoshop. Pull up the Hue/Saturation window and use the eye dropper to work with a particular part of the spectrum (When the Hue/Sat window is open, you can bring your pointer over the photo and it will change to an eye dropper so you can work with colors selectively). Pick an area that's obviously out of whack, and look into both darkening and desaturation. That's also helped me kill some of the blues.