dread240

Alrighty... melev's site once again has intrigued me into the point of action. Marc, seriously, for the love of god do not write an article about how jumping off a bridge will spur massive growths in your corals and free frags will show up from all around.

For anybody that is wondering, this is the actual article I'm referencing. http://www.melevsreef.com/fotos.html It's a very good walkthrough on settings most even the basic cameras have and how you can get some high quality shots out of them. By no means is my tank an ultimate show piece, still dealing with a bit of leftover hair algae that hasn't been cleaned up yet, and I'm quite low on corals and live stock, but still It's nice to be able to show off some really nice pictures of your work, even before it's finished. The camera I used for these photos is a quite old Olympus D560 zoom. It's a basic point and shoot camera, though it does have a few functions like a built in macro setting, exposure balance and rudimentary white balance adjustment.

First off we're going to start off with some 'full light' pics of the tank. Now I'm still finding the proper setting for these to come out perfect, I did pass them through a filter in photoshop cs5 (only thing used is the 'auto tone' feature) with no finicking with it, and then simply resized the images as the originals were about 1.5-1.9 megs a piece.

Full tank shot under all lights. It's 2x 24w 10k t5's and 2x 24w 460nm actinics.

Junior my clown fish (I cannot get him to stay put long enough for a very crisp picture of him)

Gemini the Royal Gramma

Willard the Hair algae eating machine!

and here's a few of my coral frags I'm letting grow out.

First up... Green star polyps... center of it is kind of dead, rescued it from a friends tank but you can see the new growth already on the edges.

My favorite of the bunch, Florida Ricordea

My ever frollicking frogspawn

And lastly 2 shots of my Xenia

After the full color pics were taken I decided to try some actinic photos of the tank. With all the flourescing going on in corals, I really like seeing them basking in the glue blow of just actinics near the end of the day. These photos required absolutely no touchup in photoshop at all. I used the flourescent white balance on the camera and it portrayed them just fine. In hind sight, I'm not even sure if I had the flourescent balance selected for the full color pics, as I took them earlier and waited for the daylights to go out before coming back and shooting the actinics. It could be with the proper setting, even my daylight pics would not have required any touchup.

Full tank shots under just 460nm actinics.

Many of my other fish tuck in the second the daylights go out, but Willard stayed out for a bit more.

The green star polyps under the actinics.

My Green Nepthya

The Frogspawn

And lastly, a nice shot of my Ricordea

So... as I'm sure some of us have been contemplating can we ever get those amazing shots without hundreds in camera equipment? Well maybe not the MOST AMAZING, but you can take some very very respectable photos of your tank to show off online, whether it be facebook, myspace, or any of the other myriad of websites people mainly use for flash games these days. I did not use a tripod for any pictures in this, I just did exactly like his site mentioned with propping myself up on the chair to hold it in place. I do believe a tripod would help immensely with the pics of items a bit further back in the tank, or the ones I have to zoom in on more, but it doesn't need to anything more then one of those cheap knock off tripods at best buy or something. The macro option really helped in getting the pics of the polyps since the camera wouldn't focus on them otherwise.

So we may not win some photography awards for our work (well some of you guys can) but break out the old digital and play in the menu a bit more. Read the article Marc wrote and see what you can get to come out. I honestly never though I could take pictures that look even this good, so don't doubt yourself going into it :-P