I have benefited from some very generous people who initiated me into this rather esoteric photography niche. specifically it is about photography of small fishes, ranging from a few inches to less than 1 cm. There are tips and advices out there for general aquarium and fish photography, but do note that most of them refers to fishes of significant size, anything from 5-6 inches and larger.
The techniques used for set up, shooting, lighting, equipment, etc for these two classes of fishes are very different. Here I will present the techniques I use to capture close-up photographs of fishes, generally less than two inches in size.
well, the "secret" is really in providing enough light. and lots of patience and practice. as long as you have a camera that is capable of manual control, particularly manual focus, and the ability to control an external flash, you're bascially in business.
I was previously using a Canon G5, a compact digicam which has full manual control and a flash hotshoe. I added an adaptor which allows me to screw on various close-up filters (essentially glorified magnifying glass) of +1 to +9 diopters. On this set up I took around 55,000 shots.
Earlier last year I have upgraded to a Canon digital SLR. The reason to stay with Canon was to preserve my investments in all the flash lights and paraphenalia. The reason for the upgrade was to get better picture quality. Many people are of the opinion that digicam can produce just as good picture quality as a DSLR. In truth, only at web-sizes can they be comparable. When you blow up or view the picture at larger size, the picture quality of a DSLR and a good macro lens is incomparable.
Part of my project of shooting freshwater fishes is to be able to identify their species visually, as a photo documentation, and hence I wanted the best possible image quality.
I have three shooting set ups, one is a 6-inch betta barrack. this is just plain gravel for fishes 2-inches and below. second is a 1ft cube planted at the back half, so as to encourage the fishes to swim in the open area at the front. The third is my regular 3ft tank which houses the larger specimens.
In all cases, I uses one or two Canon SpeedLite 550EX wireless capable flash, commanded by a wireless trigger (ST-E2). You can see this wireless trigger mounted on the camera body in the picture. The advantage of a wireless trigger is that you can command ANY number of wireless capable SpeedLite, and you also don't have the danger of toppling it with an offshoe cord. In all cases, the camera's flash metering continues to work so you can shoot in full manual or aperture priority modes.
Let's see some pix…
my original Canon G5 set up, mounted with ST-E2 wireless trigger, and adaptor for close-up filters.
Canon 20D DLSR, mounted with ST-E2 wireless trigger, and EF 100mm ƒ/2.8 Macro USM lens.
three different ways to position the flash, depending on the fish characteristics, whether shiny, etc.
using two flashes even in a very small tank, helps to reduce harshness and remove hard shadows.
