AQUARIUM PHOTOGRAPHY TIPS & TRICKS

AQUARIUM PHOTOGRAPHY TIPS & TRICKS

- Stefan Langenbach*

The Right Camera

For fish photography you should use a mirrorless camera because you’ll be making a lot of pictures till you’ve got THE picture you are happy about. Without a mirror there is just the mechanical shutter that can wear out. Most mirrorless cameras can make the picture even without the shutter, and so the camera will experience no mechanical wear-out while taking dozens of photographs of your fish. Depending on the light above the tank, you sometimes need to use the mechanical shutter to reduce the flicker. The flicker can be caused by the power supply of the light.

Deciding what kind of sensor the camera should have is a bit more complicated. There are three sensors available which can be differentiated by their size. The MFT-sensor is the smallest one with the biggest depth of field and the smallest pixel size. The APSC-sensor is the medium one with a good depth of field and a nice size of pixel. The Fullframe-sensor is the biggest sensor with the smallest depth of field and the biggest size of pixel. It doesn’t really matter what kind of sensor you use, but it always helps to check out how much noise various sensors of different manufacturers make.

Try to get a camera with a fast autofocus and as many frames per second as possible. The faster the autofocus and the more pictures per second you can make, the less time you need to take a spectacular picture of a swimming fish. If you want to take a picture of a shrimp while eating or a pleco just lying around, you don’t require a fast camera.