Aquarium shooting tips?

[rogergolf66]

No I'm not giving them I'm asking for them

Just purchased a nikon 3200d tring to figure out what macro lens to get so that's the first help I'm looking for.

What I currently already know. The list is short

Use tripod
Turn off pumps
I have purchased a remote for shooting so no camar shake!


Again help with lens purchase first would be great. Macro is the goal.

I have been tring to learn all I can

I understand the lower the apiture is the lower the light I can shoot in. What do u tend to set it at for aquarium stuff. A friend told me to look for a 1.4 if possible.

I know that the difference between a 60mm and 105mm is the zoom length. The 105 zooms more. I personally don't care for the shots that the front of the coral is in focus and the back of the same coral is all blurry. Do I have to have 2 differnt macro lenses to accomplish this, or what do I have to have setting at?

Again anything I don't know or links with reading please post them here.

Thx

Roger

 

[IslandCrow]

For the lens, I think around the 100mm focal length is ideal for aquarium shooting, and with the exception of full tank shots (FTS), yes, macro is ideal. On a terminology note, zoom generally refers to the ability of a lens to change focal length (e.g. 70-200mm zoom). A lens with a long focal length (around 70mm+) is referred to as telephoto. I guess you can use "magnification" for longer zoom, but that term isn't generally used for SLRs.

Anyway, symmantics aside, you're really going to want to get your arms around the concepts of aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Aperture is probably the trickiest. The larger the aperture, the bigger the opening at the front of the lens and the more light that's let in. The downside of large aperture is small depth of focus. . .i.e. front of coral is in focus and the rest is blurry. To make it even trickier, aperture is generally spoken of it terms of "f-stop" or "f-number", which is a ratio of focal length to aperture. . .so, the smaller the f-stop, the larger the aperture. So, a 1.4 aperture is quite large with a small depth of focus, whereas an f-stop of say 13 is relatively small with a much larger depth of focus.

Now that I've probably confused you, I'm going to stop, because that's just the tip of the iceberg. Actually, we haven't even gotten to the iceberg yet. Anyway, there's plenty of information online, but for someone just getting started, I'd highly recommend buying a book like Bryan Peterson's Understanding Exposure to at least get you comfortable with the basics. From there, you can delve into more specific techniques in regards to aquarium photography.

 

[rogergolf66]

I have spent t the last few days reading everything I could fine. You didn't confuse me at all. Actually that was the most clear way I have see it writen!!! That was awesome. If u could go into Shutter speed and ISO a bit that would be super.

Thanks so much for ur reply!!!

Roger

 

[rogergolf66]

For the lens, I think around the 100mm focal length is ideal for aquarium shooting, and with the exception of full tank shots (FTS), yes, macro is ideal. .

what MM is best for shooting FTS

ok just purchased the nikor 105mm/2.8 micro lens for taking pictures of corals.

 

[rogergolf66]

I found a lot of good info on basic shooting. I believe I understand Aperture, Depth of field and how to create shallow DOF Lower aperture (open) the opposite is true for Great DOF.

I learned a lot about ISO. ISO is how sensitive the camera sensor is to light. also how to use it when your camera or lens can not open or close enough to keep the proper exsposure you can use ISO to let in more or less light. but you want to shot in the lowest ISO you can as high ISO makes the pic noisy.

Shutter speed goes alone with f/stop to control how much light is let it to create properly exposed pictures. if you want to use a slower shutter speed you have to let less light in with the F/stop so a higher number (closes).

I learned a lot more then what I just typed but this gives you a better idea now of what I understand. is there any other topics you can narrow down for me like you did that I need to read about?

thx so much I learned a lot already. the camer will be here tomorrow I will get to put it to use soon !!!!

Roger

 

[mpderksen]

I'm still learning myself, don't I don't write this as an expert, by any means.
Your camera will have several modes. I'd suggest you start with Aperture Priority, which means you set the f-stop to get the depth of field you want (you say you don't like wide aperture settings, so start >5.6). Put the ISO as high as you can until you get digital noise. Your camera will be just fine at 800, or even 1600. (Actually, I'm not real sure about this part, so check with others for sure. As I said, I'm NO expert). In this mode, it will automatically select the shutter speed to expose correctly. At least with in reason. If it's too dark, click the Exposure Compensation over 1 or 2 times until everything is lit, but nothing is blown out. When you preview the shot on the back of the camera, saturated parts will blink (at least my Canon can do this). If the light parts blink, back off, if the dark parts blink, go the other way. If you can't get it in the sweet spot, then the subject isn't well lit.
Another thing that will drive you crazy is White Balance. I'm finding that very frustrating under LED lights. The trick here is to shoot in RAW, rather than .jpg mode. Then Lightroom (my recent favorite) or Photoshop can change the levels for each of the Red Blue and Green channels to balance the color.
One really nice thing is that you don't have to be as close as you think. Mine is a 12 mega-pixel camera, and post-processing I can crop down to what I want in the shot and it still be crisp.
Tripod, pumps off (and letting stuff settle), clean glass and a remote are all excellent. But there's some guys here that are amazing with none of that going on.
Is that helpful? Or too basic?

 

[IslandCrow]

Sounds like you've got the basics of the exposure triangle (ISO, shutter speed and aperture/f-stop). That's probably one of the most important technical aspects to understand. Now that you have that knowledge, it's important to know what parts of the triangle are most important for you to control before you take the photograph. This can depend on the photograph, but most often it's either aperture or shutter speed. For still life, it's pretty much always going to be aperture and controlling your depth of field. Obviously, with moving subjects, you're going to need a minimum shutter speed (and on some specific occasions, a maximum). In our imperfect world, this often calls for sacrifice. I'll usually sacrifice ISO first (i.e. use as high an ISO as you need for your shutter speed and aperture). Next, is usually aperture. Assuming a moving subject, a slow shutter speed is going to get you a blurry picture, and there's not much you can do with that (assuming that wasn't your intent). In other words it's better to have less of the photo in focus than you want (i.e. smaller depth of focus) than to have everything out of focus because your shutter speed was too slow. Speaking of focus, if you're shooting macro of stationary subjects, I'd recommend using Live View (or whatever Nikon calls it when you're using the LCD rather than the optical viewfinder). Switch to manual focus and zoom in to really nail your focus. We're often dealing with relatively small depths of field in macro photography, so millimeters count.

As mpderksen said, white balance is a good area to look into next for aquarium photography. Auto white balance often does a horrible job with our abnormally blue aquarium lighting. Even more important would be composition. That's obviously a more nebulous concept, but a technically perfect, yet poorly composed picture is seldom better than a technically mediocre, yet well composed photograph. From there, I'd look into post processing and finally supplemental lighting (i.e. off camera flash/strobes).

Oh, you also asked about lenses for full tanks shots. It really depends on the size of the tank. Something around 35mm usually works well. In addition to to giving you sufficient field of view to get the whole tank, I find the sub 50mm lenses help give a little bit of depth to the shot. Your longer lenses are going to visually compress objects in the photograph and will usually make an aquarium look very 2 dimensional.