Patience. . .or learning to love the flash

[IslandCrow]

Now that I have the equipment to start playing around with off camera flash, I'm slowly learning to love it. It's still very hit or miss with me, but I'm starting to see some of the possibilities. Anyway, it took me a couple days to get this shot, but the first time I saw it through the viewfinder, I knew I had to get it. My blenny likes to hang out in my return pipe when the pump is off. Sometimes he'll come out on his own, but other times I just have to turn the pump back on to force him back out. After quite a few failed attempts, I finally got a decent shot. The flash was positioned above the tank, angled towards the subject. Lens was my 100mm macro. Camera settings were 1/200 shutter, ISO 200 and f/18.

So, what do you think? What can I do to improve?

 

[Kalki]

That is an awesome shot. I love how the flash down gives the background such a dark look with only the subject illuminated.

 

[biolund]

I like this shot too. Quite the action shot and I can imagine how difficult it must have been getting this shot. The picture would have been improved slightly if the subjects head had been illuminated a bit more, because your eyes tend to catch the slightly lighter color of the tail section. A very dynamic shot. Good job!!!

 

[BCinYa]

Well, isn't he cute. Fish with a little bit of personality always make fun subjects to photograph.

It sounds like kind of a fun game... Turn pump off, wait for fish to swim in, turn pump on, fish gets shot out... repeat. )

Nice work on the image as well!! I agree that a little bit more frontal lighting would help. This is often a problem when lighting from above and your subject is close to the front of the tank. I'm not sure where your flash was positioned on top of the tank, but if you could move it toward the front of the tank, that'd help.

Something else that you could do is to add a reflector infront of the tank to reflect some light back into the front of the subject. Doing this you need to be very watchful of reflections of the reflector. Generally, off to the sides and a little bit below (reflecting light back up) is pretty safe. You will not be able to move around very quickly with big reflectors out the front of the tank though.

The composition is a little tough to fit into the image format of your camera (length - width of image). The really interesting part of the image fits nicely into a square composition (which is not really a digital camera format). If you wanted to show the pipe (cause that is part of the game) horizontal actually works well. Just crop in a little bit. (we will be covering this stuff on Sunday).

The bubbles are a nice part of the image but they are a little bit distracting for me.

http://chrishudsonphotography.com/macog ... alNumber=1

What did I do to your photo...

• Sharpened it
  Croped it square (after trying a number of rectangular (camera format) compositions)
  Created a new layer
  Increased contrast on the top layer (Levels)
  Lightened bottom layer (Levels)
  Erased the fishs face on the top layer so the lighter bottom layer showed through only in that area
  Flattened layers
  Saturated (& desaturated yellow)
  Blurred bubbles (one at a time)

 

[IslandCrow]

Thanks for the tips, and I really like what you did in Photoshop, Chris. My Photoshop skills are very basic, I'm still trying to get comfortable using layers. I had the flash angled pretty much directly towards the pipe he came out of, but I probably should have angled it a little more towards the glass. That's also a bit of a congested area in my tank as far as equipment goes, so there are a lot of shadows. I wonder if a little on-camera fill flash would have helped. I've always avoided using on-camera flash, but I've been playing around with my new flash fired from the camera with the diffuser on, and the results have been bad at all. Unfortunately, I set the ISO to 1600 at some point, so this is the only picture that came out acceptably.

 

[BCinYa]

With the original photo, yes, a little on-camera flash would have helped some as long as you were at a little bit of an angle to the glass so it wouldn't reflect. Set the on-camera flash to fire about 1.5 stops underexposed so that it brightened up the fish's front a bit, but doesn't overpower the light effect of the overhead flash.