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Couple of pics to illustrate the recent newcomers ... first, pic of my SAEs getting frisky after a hearty banquet ...

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Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Next, my male Florida Flag Fish ... you would not believe how hard it was to photograph this fish, partly because it kept hiding in the Java Ferns or behind the bogwood, and partly because when it appeared in the open, it appeared about 5 mm from the water surface ... and photographing a fish doing that in an aquarium that's nearly at floor level is neck straining to put it mildly

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Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Nice pics!
Just wondering, what does your FFF eat? I got one to help out with my Beard algae crisis, but it died.....probably because the little dummy(want to call him something worse, but this is a public forum) woulden't eat any of it.

"I am who I am, and who I am is who I want to be."
-Kasey Carter

Congrats on the new fish Cali.!

Maybe silly question, but was just wondering why your pics were yellow?

I'm wondering that too, especially as the back of the aquarium has a thick coating of dark green algae that doesn't show up at all in those pics despite the fact that the field of view behind the heater in pic number 1 should, theoretically, be a wall of dark green.

LHG said something in another thread about digital cameras enhancing yellows from fluorescent lights ... that might have something to do with it.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Nice to see the SAE are growing up. Thise flags are cute too, better weight than the ones at my LFS, they all look like balloon mollies from having too rich a diet.

Yeah digi cameras under flash or flourescent when involving water do tend to pick up the yellows, and not the reds and blues and greens sometimes, I get past it by using fast exposures , low flash and using the whitebalance set to work with the flash. Algae and a back panel often cause light bouncing filtration giving things a yellow hue too. Its also why I tend to shoot down slightly so the flash doesnt reflect straight back off the back panel.

Some of my tanks are backed with black paper, and even then the algae on the back panel you can barely see normally creates yellow colour diffraction of light under flash. Limits of the technology innit? Thank god for photoshop.

Strange part is, I shot those pics using an angled flash mounted on a bracket that puts some distance between the flashgun and the lens - and what's more, it allows the flash to be canted at ANY angle I desire, so that, for example, I can aim at the substrate when shooting bottom dwellers to maximise illumination of the fishes without the 'nuclear bomb flare' effect.

Another factor may have been the room lights - I'm using those energy saving light bulbs that are supposed to be spectrally matched to normal light bulbs, which if true, means that there's an additional shift in spectral balance toward the orange/yellow part of the spectrum. Even so, my flashgun should obliterate that, given that it's a beefy Olympus xenon unit rated at Guide Number 20 (ISO 100, metres) and is so powerful that it requires me to set the digital camera to 1/1000 second shutter speed (as fast as it will go) and stop right down to f11 (again, the narrowest aperture I can select). With those settings, and the huge blast of light from the flash (which is supposedly at a colour temperature of 6500 K), and gives admirable results with daylight balanced film) I'd have thought any yellow cast would have been well and truly wiped out. Mind you, Fuji Super CCD chips are notorious for performance issues in other areas (mine has truly atrocious low light performance) and furthermore, it produces strange effects if you manage to point the lens accidentally at a light bulb.

There is a custom white balance feature built into the camera that I can use in manual mode. I've looked it up in the manual, and I'll have to give it a try and see if that works. At the moment I'm using auto white balancing, but I've yet to experiment with other white balance settings, partly because I don't want to set the camera to weird settings for fish photography only to forget to change them back when I'm using the camera for entomological recording!

Oddly enough, the yellow cast has NEVER been a problem with photographing fishes at Maidenhead Aquatics, but then they have blue backgrounds on most of their aquaria, with the odd black background for fishes with special needs or high contrast markings that show up best against black (e.g., the Aphyocharax paraguayensis Characins that were there last time).

An additional thought - could the fact that the bogwood in that aquarium still leaches tannins noticeably despite being over two years old be a factor?


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Quite probably, I had pics come out a bit yellow after I put a bogwood eating ancistrus in one of my tanks. He released some tannins that were barely visible most of the time, but were visible under flash.