IslandCrow asked a question a while ago that I just reread...
"I've noticed most of your photos have very dark backgrounds, which gives great contrast to your subjects. Are you using some Photoshop magic to get that effect, or is that how the pictures are actually shot?"
There is no Photoshop used to make my backgrounds black. You'll find that I use Photoshop on a need-to basis. I would much rather be sitting behind a camera than in front of my computer so I use it for as little as possible.
If you are shooting with flash, black backgrounds are pretty easy to archive... Mount the flash units above the tank and point them down the front of the aquarium (watch out for lens flare [lightsource directly hitting glass of lens]) and leave the background in shade.
I usually shove the aquarium's light strip to the back of the tank which blocks the light from the flash from illuminating the tanks background.
I try to get my flashes at least 12" above. In the photo below, the flash is about 4 feet above the top of the tank. The higher the better as long as you have a powerful enough flash.
You'll need your fish to be posing toward the front of the tank for this to work properly.
Then if your exposures are set to match the flash's output (useing your cameras Max sync speed), anything that's not directly illuminated by the flash will go dark.
The photo below was shot using this method. The background is black paper but the biggest thing that makes the BG black is that there is just not enough light hitting the paper or the glass of the back of the aquarium to register as anything other than black at the camera's exposure settings.
My exposure would have been 1/250 (max sync speed), around f-11 at ISO 100. With those exposure settings, if I wasn't using flash to illuminate the fish, the entire frame would have been black.[/img]
"I've noticed most of your photos have very dark backgrounds, which gives great contrast to your subjects. Are you using some Photoshop magic to get that effect, or is that how the pictures are actually shot?"
There is no Photoshop used to make my backgrounds black. You'll find that I use Photoshop on a need-to basis. I would much rather be sitting behind a camera than in front of my computer so I use it for as little as possible.
If you are shooting with flash, black backgrounds are pretty easy to archive... Mount the flash units above the tank and point them down the front of the aquarium (watch out for lens flare [lightsource directly hitting glass of lens]) and leave the background in shade.
I usually shove the aquarium's light strip to the back of the tank which blocks the light from the flash from illuminating the tanks background.
I try to get my flashes at least 12" above. In the photo below, the flash is about 4 feet above the top of the tank. The higher the better as long as you have a powerful enough flash.
You'll need your fish to be posing toward the front of the tank for this to work properly.
Then if your exposures are set to match the flash's output (useing your cameras Max sync speed), anything that's not directly illuminated by the flash will go dark.
The photo below was shot using this method. The background is black paper but the biggest thing that makes the BG black is that there is just not enough light hitting the paper or the glass of the back of the aquarium to register as anything other than black at the camera's exposure settings.
My exposure would have been 1/250 (max sync speed), around f-11 at ISO 100. With those exposure settings, if I wasn't using flash to illuminate the fish, the entire frame would have been black.[/img]
