To the Arofanatics I am a beginner (1 yr), but Im an experienced photographer (>20 yrs). I have been enjoying watching the Arofanatics gallery for months. There are lots of precious and beautiful aros in gallery. However, in my personal opinion, there are few good quality photos which are clean, sharp, and true color. If the photo quality can be approved, there will be more joy in surfing this website. Therefore, I send this e-mail about my experience on taking photos of aros. If you find this useful to others, please see what you can do to share with Arofanatics.
I had taken photos for lots kind of things, human, animal, mountain, river, tree, moving or static. However, its the first time I felt frustrated at the beginning of taking photos of arowana. I found arowana is the most fascinate and the most difficult target to take good photo.
Here is my experience, and hope it will help arofanatics to show their precious aros with good photos.
1. Get a digital camera (unless you want your aros to be posted on calender)
Taking aros photo will suffer lots of failure. It costs lots of money to create very few good quality photos together with lots of garbage. The benefit of a digital camera is that you can delete any photos you dont like. So, you just spent time but not too much money.
The 35mm film of normal camera can be enlarged up to 27 without showing the pixels. And, you need a digital camera with 6 million pixels to compete with the resolution of normal camera. However, none of us are professional photographer, or in business of broadcasting or multi-media. What we need is take good pictures and share those with others via website. That means a digital camera with a resolution of computer monitor (1024X768 < 0.786M) is minimum for most of us (1 M). Unfortunately, most 1 M digital cameras are too simple without zooming or macro function. That will restrict you to show the detail of aros scale.
Therefore, I would suggest a 2 M pixels digital camera with optical zooming and macro functions would be enough. It should be remarked here that optical zooming is real while digital zooming frequently introduce defects. The price of 2M-p digital camera is around 200USD to 700USD.
2. Be patient to observe your aros.
The scales of aros show various colors with different light angles, thats why peoples love aros. Therefore, if you want to show the beauty of the aros, you should first observe you aros, and summarize the swimming pattern of the aros. Then, youll learn where is the aro swimming in a steady speed, where do the aros turn around, and where do the aros shine a specific color. After these, you can setup your camera ready, and waiting in the very spot you want to take photo.
3. Adjust the exposure complementary level
Normally the camera send a light to the target to determine the shutter speed. However, the detection mode somtimes is not fit to all cases, especially is the aro's case. Therefore, the dighital camera have a function for adjusting the exposure complementary level. It adjusts the shutter speed to be faster or slower. There are different mechanisms of detection, such as focus point detection, window averaged detection, central enhanced detection, and .. It is too complicate to be described here, so just take few photos for reference to determine whether + or the exposure complementary level (for a digital).
4. Setting the correct focus
It frequently happens that the digital camera cannot auto-focus on the scale of aro (I still don' know why). So, I always half-press the shutter to focus on aros head (it's more accurate), then move to the spot I want to take photo.
By doing this, I can always get a correct focus, but the exposing condition always wrong. I always adjust the exposure complementary level to 1 (because the aro's head always darker than the body), and I got good color and good focus of photos.
5. Use smaller optical aperture (if possible)
Smaller aperture gives you a larger depth of focus. That means when your photo taking direction is not perpendicular to the aros body, you still can get good focus through the whole body. However, smaller aperture means less light, since the lighting condition of the tank always bad, itll need longer shutter time for saturation exposure. Most of the time, this is not possible. So, just do your best. Also, set the ASA (or ISO) number to a larger number (higher sensitivity to light) will have some help.
6. Put more tank light and or other indirect light source (avoid using flash light)
I dont really recommend using flash light, because flash light always results in suppressing the aros images from 3D to 2D, losing colors, and sometimes dead fishs eye (white eye). My opinion is put more tank light and also room light so that you can get enough light for faster shutter speed. And try to move your camera along with the aro steadily while they swim in a steady speed. If you would like to take photos of a turning around aro, well I think you have to try your luck.
7. Set the camera to Macro mode if you want the details
Some cameras have function of Macro for very short distance photograph, the closest is around to 10 cm. Under this mode, you can take very detailed photos of your aros scale.
But it is very difficult in macro mode to take good pictures of aro, you need steady hands and move along well with aro.
8. And finally, all you need now is good luck!
by CDM Arofanatics.com
I had taken photos for lots kind of things, human, animal, mountain, river, tree, moving or static. However, its the first time I felt frustrated at the beginning of taking photos of arowana. I found arowana is the most fascinate and the most difficult target to take good photo.
Here is my experience, and hope it will help arofanatics to show their precious aros with good photos.
1. Get a digital camera (unless you want your aros to be posted on calender)
Taking aros photo will suffer lots of failure. It costs lots of money to create very few good quality photos together with lots of garbage. The benefit of a digital camera is that you can delete any photos you dont like. So, you just spent time but not too much money.
The 35mm film of normal camera can be enlarged up to 27 without showing the pixels. And, you need a digital camera with 6 million pixels to compete with the resolution of normal camera. However, none of us are professional photographer, or in business of broadcasting or multi-media. What we need is take good pictures and share those with others via website. That means a digital camera with a resolution of computer monitor (1024X768 < 0.786M) is minimum for most of us (1 M). Unfortunately, most 1 M digital cameras are too simple without zooming or macro function. That will restrict you to show the detail of aros scale.
Therefore, I would suggest a 2 M pixels digital camera with optical zooming and macro functions would be enough. It should be remarked here that optical zooming is real while digital zooming frequently introduce defects. The price of 2M-p digital camera is around 200USD to 700USD.
2. Be patient to observe your aros.
The scales of aros show various colors with different light angles, thats why peoples love aros. Therefore, if you want to show the beauty of the aros, you should first observe you aros, and summarize the swimming pattern of the aros. Then, youll learn where is the aro swimming in a steady speed, where do the aros turn around, and where do the aros shine a specific color. After these, you can setup your camera ready, and waiting in the very spot you want to take photo.
3. Adjust the exposure complementary level
Normally the camera send a light to the target to determine the shutter speed. However, the detection mode somtimes is not fit to all cases, especially is the aro's case. Therefore, the dighital camera have a function for adjusting the exposure complementary level. It adjusts the shutter speed to be faster or slower. There are different mechanisms of detection, such as focus point detection, window averaged detection, central enhanced detection, and .. It is too complicate to be described here, so just take few photos for reference to determine whether + or the exposure complementary level (for a digital).
4. Setting the correct focus
It frequently happens that the digital camera cannot auto-focus on the scale of aro (I still don' know why). So, I always half-press the shutter to focus on aros head (it's more accurate), then move to the spot I want to take photo.
By doing this, I can always get a correct focus, but the exposing condition always wrong. I always adjust the exposure complementary level to 1 (because the aro's head always darker than the body), and I got good color and good focus of photos.
5. Use smaller optical aperture (if possible)
Smaller aperture gives you a larger depth of focus. That means when your photo taking direction is not perpendicular to the aros body, you still can get good focus through the whole body. However, smaller aperture means less light, since the lighting condition of the tank always bad, itll need longer shutter time for saturation exposure. Most of the time, this is not possible. So, just do your best. Also, set the ASA (or ISO) number to a larger number (higher sensitivity to light) will have some help.
6. Put more tank light and or other indirect light source (avoid using flash light)
I dont really recommend using flash light, because flash light always results in suppressing the aros images from 3D to 2D, losing colors, and sometimes dead fishs eye (white eye). My opinion is put more tank light and also room light so that you can get enough light for faster shutter speed. And try to move your camera along with the aro steadily while they swim in a steady speed. If you would like to take photos of a turning around aro, well I think you have to try your luck.
7. Set the camera to Macro mode if you want the details
Some cameras have function of Macro for very short distance photograph, the closest is around to 10 cm. Under this mode, you can take very detailed photos of your aros scale.
But it is very difficult in macro mode to take good pictures of aro, you need steady hands and move along well with aro.
8. And finally, all you need now is good luck!
by CDM Arofanatics.com
