No flash aquarium photography has many advantages over shooting tanks with a flash. Color is richer and more realistic. Just as you did with using a flash, it is recommended to adjust the white balance until the colors of your aquarium pictures closely match the real thing. In relation to flash photography, these photos will have more depth and less shadow to deal with.
Fish are constantly moving. Swimming around the tank looking for food, or hovering in place, their fins are always moving. Even when stationary, their mouths and gills are still in motion. For this reason, it is difficult to use slow shutter speeds in aquarium photography.
Another obstacle is low light conditions, which a slower shutter speed would help with. The slower the shutter speed, the more light is allowed to enter the camera. However, you have that pesky problem of the fish moving, or your camera moving and blurring the shot.
Resources
Aquarium Advice is an awesome website devoted to all aspects of fish keeping. They have a very active forum divided into categories so you can instantly focus on the information you need.
Also, check out one of my earlier articles – The issue of using or not using flash is discussed there, too.
Using a tripod helps eliminate the camera movement, and if you add supplemental lighting you can increase the lighting in your aquarium and achieve sharper images.
If your subject is a lazy Plecostomus for example, you can slow the shutter speed to 1/100 or even 1/50 of a second and shoot with a tripod.
However, if you set your camera for an exposure time of 1/250s you can take pictures without a tripod. It then becomes possible to quickly react to the movement of your subject.
In order to do this, you will need to open up the aperture as much as possible. This will get the maximum amount of light onto the camera’s sensor.
Tell Us About It
Have you used the no flash aquarium photography method in your fish shots? How did it go? Comment below and share your experience with us.