Some Photography Tips

[ReefMatt]

Last week I took some photos of a gorgeous reef tank in Kirkland, and it was my first real attempt at macro reef tank photography.

I ended up writing a blog post about it (with a few more photos) with some of the general strategies I had in mind going in.

You can read it here:
http://www.gorephoto.com/blog/?p=626

Here's one of the photos that I liked:

Hope someone finds this helpful

- Matthew Gore

 

[cyber_ecco]

Nice pics...wish I could take pics like that.

 

[reedman]

great write up. I plan to utilize this info next time I take pics of the tank. Thanks!

 

[ReefMatt]

Thanks guys. I'm actually updating the post with more photos as I decide which ones I like.

- Matthew

 

[ReefMatt]

OK, FWIW, I just updated my blog post/guide with a few more photos... they're not really instructional or anything, they just take up space.

http://www.gorephoto.com/blog/?p=626

Here are a couple of them...

- Matthew Gore

 

[ronone10]

Hi Mathew,

I enjoyed the blog and liked your equipment review. Funny thing is I am an avid photographer (mostly sports) but I haven't taken any photos of my reef yet. I returned to the hobby about a year ago. I think shooting through glass and dealing with flash, motion, close-up, color shift, unpredictable subjects hasn't interested me.

My tank is still young so I guess I am waiting for everything to mature a bit more.

Thanks for sharing. Ron

 

[ReefMatt]

Thanks!

If your tank isn't very mature yet, it might actually be really cool to start taking photos of it now so that you can periodically take shots for comparison, and (if you're careful about it) you could use Flash or some movie-maker program to morph them together to make a time-lapse progression.

Maybe that would be more trouble than it's worth. I do like the idea of a storyline for the tank, though.

- Matt

 

[Brie]

Was finally able to sit down and read through your entire article. I think it'll be helpful to people who have problems shooting their reef tanks.

Remarks from the peanut gallery, for what their worth: I've found that chromatic abberation is less in tanks that are made with starfire glass or glass of equal quality(Elos so far has the best clarity with macro shots), something about standard green tank glass really messes with colors close up. I think it might also be light related too, but haven't quite figured that out yet. Flash seems to help me, though I just use my onboard flash ATM.

This was shot through the thick glass of an Elos tank, and I always get the best results in this tank, probably thanks to the glass being such high quality...

And one shot through the glass of a standard 75gal breeder... I tried to fix as much of the chromatic abberation as I could along the gobies face and back, but its still obvious... (was also shot at a much higher ISO).

I've also always had alot of problems thinking my shots are totally sharp, but then when I got back to a computer, found out their all slightly out of focus... I think water distortion just gets the better of our cameras/lenses, and after a certain depth, there just isn't anything we can do about it...

I do if at all possible try using an f-stop of 10-18, and this keeps most things pretty crisp... But if at all possible, I bring stuff like coral foreward in the tank if I need to get a good crisp photo of it... As with fish, fish are my nemesis and I suck at getting shots of them.. lol. I rarely get any good shots of fish due to their constant motion.

 

[ronone10]

Hi Brie, wonderful shots. When I shoot sports, one step in post production is using a sharpening program like Noise Ninja. You are probably aware of such programs. Anyway, I took your photo and was able to sharpen it up a bit. So, the almost sharp areas now look much better. I didn't want to post it with our your permission. Ron

 

[ronone10]

Forgot to mention that it also cleans up the noise (Noise Ninja)

So, you can shoot at much higher ISO...

 

[Brie]

Hi Brie, wonderful shots. When I shoot sports, one step in post production is using a sharpening program like Noise Ninja. You are probably aware of such programs. Anyway, I took your photo and was able to sharpen it up a bit. So, the almost sharp areas now look much better. I didn't want to post it with our your permission. Ron

I use photoshop CS4, both photos were already sharpened... Anything more I think makes them look oversharpened, but I wouldn't mind seeing what they look like run through another program... Shoot me a PM. Don't want to take over Matt's post.

 

[ronone10]

Done and you are absolutely correctly...

 

[ReefMatt]

Brie, those are some beautiful photos I don't actually see any chromatic aberration in the goby at this level of enlargement, so you must have done a good enough job in ACR. Unless some of what looks to me like actual detail is color fringing... but that would be much worse CA than I've seen before.

Thats an interesting point about the glass quality; I hadn't really thought about it. The tank I was shooting was probably not glass at all... some sort of acrylic maybe. It looked just fine for normal viewing, but up close it had a lot of micro-scratches (and some not-so-micro scratches). Of course, the photographer can't really do anything about that, except lower their expectations a bit maybe.

- Matt

 

[ReefMatt]

I suppose that it's also worth mentioning that every lens has an optimal aperture setting at which it has the highest resolution and depth of field before the resolution is diminished by diffraction (caused by light bouncing off the edge of the aperture leaves).

For most lenses, it seems that the highest resolution comes around f11 (give or take a stop), depending on the manufacturer. Beyond that, you may still get more depth of field but at the cost of absolute sharpness at the plane of focus. There are lots of lens test sites out there that will tell you what your lens' optimum aperture is, but I like http://www.photozone.de/ . If you mostly shoot with just a few lenses, it's worth looking them up and making a note. There will still be lots of times that you won't use the lens at that aperture, but it can be helpful to know what it is when that's what you're going for.

As Ever,
Matthew Gore