Well, you know I want some of that blue tennuis!! Blue, when mixed with other colours, I have trouble capturing. Dropping the exposure definitely helps..
Ok. That set up should be able to provide results as good as anything you see on RC.
First, I'd take the camera out of program mode and put it in full manual, or aperture priority. Then bump the ISO up to around 640. And set the color to cloudy or 8000-10000 k if your camera has those options.
In manual, you are able to open or close the aperture depending on the field of focus you want. Small aperture (big number) will give a wider depth of field. Small number (big aperture) a closer depth of field.
You should start with a reasonably high iso (unless you have crazy amounts of light over your tank) because as you go up in aperture number (smaller aperture) your camera will have to slow down the shutter speed to compensate for the reduced light getting into the camera. I usually shoot between 640 and 1000 iso.
Macro lenses are designed to not give a very large depth of field so I am often shooting at small aperture like 11 and up.
The one issue with small apertures, is that a certain amount of crispness or sharpness is lost. I think the best bang for the buck for depth and sharpness is around 8-11.
This shot was taken at an aperture of around 11, if I recall..
You can see the front of the green coral and just below it, the red coral are in focus.. I don't remember the shutter speed but it was probably around 1/100th
His shot, which has an aperture value of probably 25 or so and a shutter speed of around 1/10. The image isn't as sharp but there is more in focus.
These two shots were taken through the front glass. When I shoot through the front glass, I put the lens right up against the glass of the tank. This allows for the use of very slow shutter speeds and the best clarity of image. As soon as you try to shoot through the front glass on any type of angle, the glass in the camera lens and the glass of the tank don't play nice and the images get blurred a bit.
Remember, when shooting at slow shutter speeds, any movement will end up looking blurry, so turn off all your pumps when shooting the tank. This allows the polyps to stop moving and also, I find that for some reason, when there's no flow, the polyps extend a bit more..
Try to fill the frame absolutely completely with the subject, if you can. Obviously this depends on how close it is to the lens. Macro lenses allow you to get pretty close. You can even have the edges of the subject fall slightly out of the viewfinder image because the viewfinder doesn't give you the entire image that will be produced when you actually take the picture.
Make sure your camera is set to capture the largest/best possible image quality as well. I don't think you are able to capture raw images but make sure it is capturing the largest jpeg images it can.
This is important because often, when you see a super duper macro shot like this:
It has been cropped down from a shot like this:
You can see how the first shot isn't as crisp as the second. That's because of the cropping, or post magnifying of the original image. And actually even my second image was cropped already.
So, the most mega pixels/most information/highest quality image you have to start with, the more you can magnify or crop the image.
Ok, then.. that's a lot of info to digest in one shot...
Play around with your camera on something other than the tank to start. Get a hang of playing with the settings and how to toggle between apertures and shutter speeds. And feel free to ask me anything you want or even post some test shots for 'critical review'
