How do you guys get those great photos???

[Lisaod12]

I have an older digital camera, but I can not seem to get the picture quality you guys get.
I love look at the photos of your tanks!!

How do you do it?

What Camera's do you guys use?

[Jimnorris]

Lisa,
I use a HP 618 camera. It's about 4 years old now. It has 2.1 pixel which now adays is nothing. I get lucky and sometimes shoot some nice shots. I have found out that the lighting of the tank makes or breaks my pictures. I have tried all manual settings and total automatic settings and the automatic works best for me. What kind of camera do you have?
Jim

[MikeP]

Take lots of pictures One is bound to be good. Also try setting the white balance and angle the camera so that the flash wont reflect off the glass. On that note - clean your glass very well. Also using a tripod seems to help a lot of people but I don't usually use one.

[Lisaod12]

I don't know a lot about this stuff so bear with me..
It has a high setting of 1152x864 which is what it's set at.

With the flash, I get a good bit of glare and without the flash I get a lot of blurr.

I just took about 10 pictures, none of which I really like. I guess I'll just keep trying.

I'm wondering if I need a better camera or just to keep at it?
Thanks for the advice.

I'll keep trying for now.

[Jimnorris]

If you want to look I just posted about 25 new pictures on my website. Again this is an old camera too!
Jim
www.tanku.net

[adamRS80]

In my experience using the flash totally ruins the picture. You should have plenty of light from your tank and not use the flash at all. I also think pictures under metal halide naturally turn out better...I just switched form power compact to 10k aqualine and my pictures look good and thats the only thing I've changed. That doesn't explaine why garf.org has such great photo's under VHO's. The megapixels really don't matter unles you plan on enlarging the photo. A 1 megapixel camera is totally fine if you don't plan on printing anything bigger than a 4x6 or 5x8. If I remember correctly 640x480 is as low as you can go for a decent looking 4x6. The clean glass definitly helps alot too. Try fiddling with the white balance a little as some others have mentioned. When I was using PC's it did make some difference.

[djdubdub]

(I have about 330watts of fluorescent light on my tank, so this may be different for you but...)

I like to turn on all of my lights first of all. I set my F-stop at F2.8 30. Usually this is an "expert" setting. The setting is usually darker but the bright lights will bring out good "hightlights" on the corals/fish. I do not use my flash.

Then I get right up on the glass, zoom in as much as I can without the picture getting fuzzy, and snap...

Good Luck... See my pics in the Gallery... Let me know what you think.