Any camera people out there?

[cycled123]

I have a canon eos rebel xsi camera with standard 18-55 lens and a fujifilm xp 70 point and shoot underwater camera. I know very little about photography beyond the basics. Do you have any suggestions to get good pictures of my fish and corals? Is there another lens option? (fish eye, macro, wide angle ect) I am willing to invest a little money but not over a couple hundred. My other hobby is scrapbooking and I want to get some decent pictures. Looking at some of the pictures on the forum I know there are a few people out there that know what they are doing, lol

 

Sorry just found the photography section under miscellaneous and got most of my questions answered. But if anyone has anything to add... On another note can you delete posts once they are posted?

 

 

[Pjanssen]

you can PM to one of the moderators and as them to delete or you

[jbb]

Down by the edit button should be a delete button .

 

 

Click that one .

[seabass]

So cycled123, what did you come up with? Are you going to give extension tubes a try? Unfortunately, a good 100mm macro lens will probably break your budget.

Down by the edit button should be a delete button.

Although you can't delete the first post of a thread.

[Scorched]

The best thing to do is white balance your camera to the lights on your tank. Using auto white balance will not be good enough due to how intense and blue our lights usually are. If you were running metal halides with some T5s you can usually use auto mode and have pictures turn out great but LEDs totally screw with the cameras sensor and you'll be left with super blue/purple photos.

 

To do the custom white balance take a piece of white paper or if your walls are fairly neutral you can even use that. Set the lens to manual focus and defocus the lens. So it looks super blurry. Take a photo of the paper close to the tank or the back wall if its a grey/white color. You should have a blue picture now saved to your memory card. Take a few pictures that have varying amounts of blue, if you can't adjust your LEDs just move the paper closer or further away from the light source.

 

Now go into your cameras menu and select custom white balance. You then choose one of these blurry photos and click ok. Back out of the menu and then change your WB setting on the back of the camera from Auto to Custom, its usually the last one. This new custom WB will alter blue photos and correct them to be whiter/yellower. Having control over your LED light fixture can be a huge help as you can then add more or less blue/white until the picture looks as close to your eye sees it as possible.

 

For me I white balanced to my standard mid day settings (White LEDs 40%, Blues, 90%, Color 15%, Cyan 15%) and when I actually take my photos I've found the best colors are represented when I turn my light to 20% white, 100% blue, 0%, 0%. So it will take a lot of trial and error before you find the best settings for you. For you it might be the opposite that looks better. 90-100% white, 10% blue.

 

Another tip that I've found gets better pictures faster is to just use jpegs instead of raw photos. I love to use raw photos for everything except tank photography. Raw lets you have total control over exposure and shadows but when photographing a reef tank you will find this extra control doesn't do much if you can't recover a maxed out blue photo. Even if you custom white balance first the Raw photo will hold the data in a state that maxes out the blue/yellow color balance. By white balancing first and using jpeg you are saving the photo EXACTLY as you set it up in camera.

[ajmckay]

Great post scorched... I've done a similar thing with my custom white balance - but I haven't done any tinkering with the LEDs after that though (I also set my white bal to the mid-day light settings) but sometimes they come out just a smidge too yellow/white. So doing a little bit of manual tinkering with the lights is a good idea.

[brad908]

Always shoot in RAW

[cycled123]

Thanks scorched! That's exactly what I am looking for Macro lens is going to have to wait a bit. All extra cash is going to starting the reef...

[asting]

Or just shoot raw and adjust white balance later....

[jcolletteiii]

Tripod.