Lessons learned on photographing fish tanks
At long last I finally received my 5D Mark II! I received it literally the day before heading out on a flight to upstate New York to see my parents, so I didn’t get a real chance to play with it until I arrived there.
My father has a 240 gallon reef tank, so I decided to play with it a bit. I used my 180L combined with my MT-24EX to get these shots. None of them are spectacular, but I did learn a few things from photographing them.
First, I learned that you need to shoot straight at the tank in order for the shot to not be distorted. My first attempts were at an angle – as I would for any normal shot. However, the glass on the tank was so thick that I noticed shots were blurry no matter what I tried. They were also blurry in the viewfinder – so it was not a focus thing.
Another big issue were the reflections of the lights themselves. On a number of my early shots one of the lights reflected off the glass into the camera itself. This is really just a family of angles problem and I solved it by using two Wimberley macro brackets that held the lights so that they hit the glass at a very low angle and therefore did not reflect into the camera.
Another problem I ran into was the strength of the lights themselves. If you look at the EXIF for these shots, you’ll notice that I shot them at ISO 800. The main reason I did this is that even at full strength the MT-24EX was not powerful enough to fully light the shot. I suspect that there were two reasons for this.
- Due to the brackets and the distance from the subject with the 180L, the lights were a bit too far from the subject for the power of the MT-24EX.
- The tank glass and water ate up a good deal of the light.
I suspect that the solution would have been to place a 580EX on each of the Wimberley brackets instead of the MT-24EX and use Pocketwizards to fire them. Unfortunately I did not get the chance to attempt this because I was really there for family – not for photography.
One thing I was very happy with was the focal length of the 180L. I do not think that a 100mm macro would have helped here and I didn’t even bother with the MP-E 65. Due to the glass, I could only get a certain distance from the fish. Luckily, the 180L was about the perfect length here.
He has quite a few fish and different types of anemones in the tank. At night a shrimp comes out but I did not have the chance to photograph it. A number of the fish were also a bit skittish and didn’t let me get a good shot of them. Still, it was fun just shooting again.
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Tags: fish, macro, photography, tank
I don’t know if you are aware of a problem that plagues the 5D Mark II camera. Check for ‘black dots’ on the ‘Underexposed’ blog of http://www.news.com portal. It’s one of the last posts.
I have heard of the black dot problem, but as I understand this only occurs if you have areas of high contrast vs. low contrast in the shot, have auto lighting optimizer turned on, shoot at high ISO, and then blow the image up to at least 400%. Even then I have heard that not everyone could repro this and that Canon plans to release a fix soon.
I have also heard that other cameras (including Nikons) exhibit this behavior to varying degrees. Some people just have too much time on their hands and have unrealistic expectations.