Aquarium Photography: Getting Started

This article is intended for those that can’t afford or simply don’t want to purchase a digital SLR camera. If your eyes glaze over at the mere mention of words like aperture, then this is the article for you. We’ll assume you have a point and shoot camera and want to make the best of it using the automatic settings. Much of the preparation work mentioned in this article is applicable to all aquarium photographs. Here are some of the things you can do to make the best of what you have while keeping it simple and affordable.

The Aquarium

How the aquarium is set up will have an impact on the quality of the photos you are able to obtain. At this point, there may not be a lot you want to change about your aquarium. After all, you set it up the way you wanted it and aquarium photography probably wasn’t one of your original considerations. However, there are some things to keep in mind.

An aquarium that is best for taking pictures of fish, has minimized the items that distract the eye away from the fish. A brightly colored substrate or background will make the photo too busy. Many people feel that the best photographs are free from unnatural items like a bubble wand, clay pots, or some of the unusual aquarium decorations. Do your best to hide even the necessary items like heaters and filters from the background, if possible. If your aquarium has no background, then you might want to drape a cloth or hang a piece of posterboard behind the tank so you don’t include your flowered wallpaper in the picture. I have painted the back of all of my tanks black.

One other thing to keep in mind is that the best picture taking tanks are the smaller straight front tanks. A bow front tank can distort the picture. A large tank has thicker glass and it also means that a particular fish might not visit the front of the tank.

Preparing the Aquarium

This may be the single most important step. The very first thing you can do is to feed your fish in the morning. That way they might not act quite so starved when they see you near the tank in the evening. (With mbuna this step doesn’t make much difference since they always behave as if they’re starving.) You should start cleaning the aquarium in the morning so that everything has a chance to settle by the evening. Wipe the algae off the glass on the inside of the tank and vacuum the gravel. Then do a water change and maybe change a bit higher percentage of the water on picture day. If you have a bubble wand, be sure to turn it off in the morning to allow water borne debris to settle. Also, you might or might not want to clean your filter depending upon your situation. (We’ll discuss that later.) Finally, clean the glass on the outside of the tank.

The very last step is to adjust and maximize the tank lighting. I have a triple tube strip light that I use only at picture taking time. Move the light fixture(s) to the very front of the tank and turn them on. If you wait until the evening to turn it on, the fish might scatter under the rocks and take a lot of time returning to their normal routine. The light fixture should not hang over the front creating a reflection on the outside front of the aquarium glass. You might consider adding lights (cheap shop lights) all across the aquarium for maximum lighting. I prefer to just light the front of the tank and let the back of the tank remain dark to make the fish more prominent in the picture.

Almost Ready to Snap the Picture

Now you wait until the evening so that the room is completely dark. Be sure to turn off all the lights leaving only the aquarium lights on. That includes televisions, computer monitors and maybe even any other aquariums in the room. I often set up a chair backwards near the aquarium. I straddle the chair and use the back of the chair to steady the camera and to rest my arms. Since you fed them in the morning before the water change, any tiny bits of food have settled or hopefully been eliminated by the water change. If I have multiple filters on the tank, then it might be necessary to turn off one that may be creating bubbles or excessive water movement. Obviously you need to be very careful about turning off your biological filtration.

This may sound obvious, but you should make sure your camera is ready to shoot. Charge up those batteries (or replace old ones) and offload old pictures so you have the maximum space on your camera media storage for a lot of pictures.

Now spend a little time watching your fish. You just sat down, so they’re all excited thinking they’re going to get fed again. Once they settle down a bit, you might notice that one of your fish is in a fin flaring mood and is hanging out on one particular side of the tank.

Snapping the Picture

You’re probably amazed (and maybe a little impatient) that it’s taken this long to get to the actual photography. As I said in the beginning, I’m assuming you have a point and shoot camera and you do not want to shoot in manual mode. Many point and shoot cameras have a macro setting. It’s a little flower icon and it helps to focus on subjects that are very close to the camera. If you have a macro setting then set your dial on the flower. Hopefully, your tank is now brightly lit so that the automatic focus is able to focus better and faster. Some point and shoot cameras will show the most natural fish color without the flash. Others cameras require a flash to show a clear photo with good detail.

The most common mistake people make is pointing the camera directly at the glass and directly at the fish. If you use the flash you do not want the reflection of the flash bouncing off the glass and back into the lens. You need to point the camera at an angle to the glass. The same can be said of the fish. If the flash reflects off the fish’s body, back into the lens, then the color will be distorted. Pointing down a bit onto the fish generally results in a more desirable picture than pointing up. So point that camera down a bit at an angle to both the fish and the glass. Since you are very close to the fish and your point and shoot camera has no power adjustment for the flash, you might want to take steps to reduce and disperse the light from the flash if it is too bright. One way to do this is to clamp a tissue over the flash.

The closer the fish is to the front of the tank, the more detail you will get. If you can get a full profile shot of a fish near the front of the tank with fins flared and a few plants in the background, then you’ve got a great shot. One of the reasons to study your fish’s behavior is so that you can anticipate its next move. Pressing the camera button down part way to focus and then the rest of the way to snap the picture takes less than a second, but that is often all it takes for the fish to move out of the frame. The great thing about digital photography is that it costs nothing to snap hundreds of pictures, so fire at will.

Post Processing

Almost all cameras come with software to adjust the jpeg file. A basic photo processing program will allow you to crop, sharpen and brighten the picture. There are three rookie mistakes that can ruin a good picture. First, be careful not to crop the photo too close. A photo with almost no space at all between the edge of the picture and the fish’s body has very little visual appeal. The second mistake is over sharpening. Sharpening the photo will enhance the detail but if you overdo it, the picture will take on a very unrealistic look which is not at all appealing. The last common mistake made by beginning fish photographers is adjusting the color to enhance it. If you adjust color you should do so in a manner to represent the actual subject. There are entirely too many pictures on the Internet with overly adjusted color.

 

I took this picture in 2001 with a Sony 2.1 megapixel point and shoot camera.

An expensive digital SLR camera will help a good photographer take better pictures. However, even a less expensive camera will be able to take good pictures if you practice enough to learn how to make the best of the camera that you have. You’ve probably heard many times that taking a clear detailed photo is all about obtaining the proper amount of light.

Sharing your Pictures

I hope this article helped you to make the most out of your point and shoot camera. Now, you are ready to share your work with the forum. You can store your pictures on one of the free photo hosting sites on the web or right here in the Cichlid Gallery at cichlidforums.com. Simply click on the “Cichlid Gallery” link and then click on “Create a New Album” to start uploading the files from your computer. You can link to your pictures in a thread by using the image tags, [img]the URL[/img]. It would be great if you would help us expand the number of species profiles in the CichlidBase by adding your high quality pictures.

Kevin Bauman