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.

1. 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.
2. 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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