my fish shots at http://users.bestweb.net/~hchong/Random/Fish.htm are the result of a lot of patience more than anything else. most of these fish were at one time or another in my 50 gallon tank. i guess that is about 180l for those who are not in the US. only dscn0436.jpg is not from that tank. all these pictures were taken with my Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera, a 2 megapixel model. i no longer own the camera.
first problem to solve was getting a lot of even light. i have two twin-tube florescent light fixtures on top of the tank with a total of 4 30W high output bulbs installed. i think that there was about 1000 lux worth of light going into the tank. all other light was turned off so i would not get any reflections from the glass. the next problem was CCD sensitivity. the 950 allows setting to a maximum of ISO 400 and that is what i did. that's not enough. i set exposure compensation to -2 stops. basically, that gave me ISO 1600 digital film to shoot with. after that, it was lots and lots of patience. these 15 pictures represent about 600 pictures worth of shooting, probably about 10 hours total time sitting in front of the tank. lots of times, the fish moved enough to hopelessly blur the picture. very few of the shots were taken with shutter speeds as fast as 1/30s. i had to shoot in macro mode to get large enough pictures. also, i had to sit very still because too much movement scares the fish. i never was able to get any decent pictures of my clown loaches because they are too skittish. the fish in the pictures on the site are basically pretty calm about things that don't move quickly near them. after loading them on the computer, i had to apply Photoshop's auto contrast to stretch the brightness range back to something reasonable. this is much the same as push processing without some of the nonlinearity headaches of film. yes, there is a noise problem, but as you can see, it is less than people might imagine. i didn't have to do much to the color because the lamps i use are designed to simulate a 6700K light source. next, because even in the cleanest aquarium with real fish and plants in it, there is a lot of debris and air bubbles that catch the light. i had to edit them out by cloning over them. there are a couple of hot pixels in the CCD that had to be cloned over too. basically, patience and a little knowledge of how to push digital film made the difference. Herb....
