# Canon 200d



## mow said (19 Feb 2018)

Took some photos on my new canon 200d with the lens that the camera came with. These photos are not edited.


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## Edvet (19 Feb 2018)

More light, faster shooting and smaller apertures, will give sharper pics.


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## ceg4048 (20 Feb 2018)

mow said said:


> Took some photos on my new canon 200d with the lens that the camera came with. These photos are not edited.


Hi mow,
            Don't get upset OK? I'm not bashing you but just offering advice to help your photography. I assume that's why you posted the shots, right?

OK, look, here goes; There's really not much point in unedited photos. An editing program is just as important as the data extracted from the camera - and your compositional skills and choice of f-stop and so forth are even more important.

The camera sees the world a lot differently than you do. It can only see in 2D so you really have to manipulate the image so that it represents the depth and emotion that you felt when you took the shot in the first place.
If you want to recreate that feeling then composing, selection and editing is paramount.

I'm going to talk about that tetra photo as a proxy for the rest of the images.
 So in my opinion only, the first mistake is that you placed the subject of the photo in the exact middle of the photo. This is a feaux pas in composition. Remember Amano's Rule of Thirds? This is why he was such an awesome aquascaper, because he brought the compositional rules of photography and applied them to the scapes. He was a photographer, first and foremost. So when you take the shot it will be static, so you have to create movement by suggesting that the subject is either entering the scene or leaving the scene. The composition would have been better place in any of the nine "third" squares except the one in the middle.

Obviously, this particular photo fails due to subject-out-of-focus. The object of focus should be the eyes, but no big deal. This is just a matter of practice.

I checked the metadata on the image and it appears you used ISO 5000?? at f-stop 2.8??
If that's the case, you have immediately sacrificed whatever sharpness and smoothness you might have been able to extract in your photo editor because high ISO is filled with noise.

When you shoot a digital image, especially a high quality on such as this, the sensor is able to capture huge amounts of data regardless of the settings, but you are only able to extract the information cleanly if you record the data in RAW, and only if you are using a quality editor such as Photoshop. So you could easily have shot that image at 1/100th, at an f-stop of f8 and at ISO 400 or ISO 800.
Subsequently, when you first look at the original, it will of course be underexposed - but the information is there, recorded by that 24 megapixel sensor. That is the REASON for 24 megapixels. You can only exploit this full capability in RAW.

Open the image in your editor and use Curves or Levels to retrieve the luminosity data. You have a lot of dynamic range in that camera so use it.

I downloaded your photo and did some quick manipulations in Photoshop. I'm sure that some of the wizards out there could have done an amazing job of dataretrieval, but I found the limitations of ISO 5000 to be very restrictive - unless I was intentionally looking to add grain and harshness to the shot - which, is a valid artistic goal, but probably not in this context.

I cropped it at the top because there was an annoying bright spot in the upper right corner. You are never forced to use the entire frame of a shot and in fact seldom is it even ever used. You should always crop out the extraneous parts of an image that do not contribute to the photograph.

I used Curves to improve contrast and you can see the difference in the near 3Dimensionality of the fish's body.

I saturated the colors to bring out the reds. This pulls the data of the black, white and red of the dorsal.

The contrast adjustment adds a greater tonal palette to the greens and is more pleasing against the reds.

There is not much we can do to restore the lost focus, it's irretrievable. That's just bad luck and a missed opportunity.

The original shot was actually overexposed at ISO 5000, yielding a harsh an unpleasant photo. Using Curves I was able to pull down the harshness.
I used noise reduction and smoothed out some of the grain.

More work is necessary on the leaves of the red plants as they are now too high a contrast and the algae (GSA) is more exposed, but overall, I think this adjustment comes closer to expressing what you might have intended when you were looking through the viewfinder.

In any case, you might want to experiment with underexposing the shots in order to keep the shutter speed high enough to capture action. Try to find the limits of how low an ISO can be used with the sharpest f-stop of that particular lens. Most lenses perform their best at f8 to f5.6.

Hope this helps.





Cheers,


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## mow said (20 Feb 2018)

Hi ceg ,
There is no way that I am upset I mean I've learned something without even asking as I was just testing my camera . I haven't really used dslr before this is my first camera I bought. And I do appreciate you commenting and explaining aquarium photography to me. I will have to read what you said and understand it couple of times . And thank you again for explaining it to me.


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## George Farmer (20 Feb 2018)

I miss you, Clive.

Nice pic Mow! Practice is the number one way to improve your technique and overall ability.


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## mow said (20 Feb 2018)

Thanks george and i enjoy your youtube videos allot keep em coming


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## mow said (20 Feb 2018)

Hey clive here is some pictures i took minutes ago with f8 and ISO 800 is this what you was talking about and ofcorse i did not edit these as i wanted to understand first what you was talking about


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## ceg4048 (21 Feb 2018)

mow said said:


> Hey clive here is some pictures i took minutes ago with f8 and ISO 800 is this what you was talking about and ofcorse i did not edit these as i wanted to understand first what you was talking about


Hi mow,
            Yeah mate, this is exactly what I mean. Of course they are a little  underexposed straight out of the camera but compare how much more saturated the colors are to begin with.
The problem with these is that the fishes bodies are much darker than the background, so that will present a problem when you do the editing, but every photos has it's problems and it's not difficult to pull better contrast and brightness out of the bodies without damaging other areas.

Shooting at or near f8 also gives you a wider depth of field, i.e. more parts are in focus, so already I can see better focus of the eyes.
I reckon the best shot is #2, so clean and smooth and it's a lot easier to work with an image that comes out of the camera with better, focus, and colors.

Definitely continue to explore the limits of how low an ISO you can get away with and then try recovering the brightness and contrast with your editor. Low ISO = cleaner image with better colors.

Cheers,


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## mow said (21 Feb 2018)

Thank you clive i will definitely take your advice and carry on practicing. By the way what software do you use to edit photos? Or what do you think is the best software out there, adobe Photoshop ?


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## LondonDragon (23 Feb 2018)

mow said said:


> adobe Photoshop ?


For adjusting photos, Lightroom is more than enough, great set of filters and very flexible.


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## mow said (23 Feb 2018)

LondonDragon said:


> For adjusting photos, Lightroom is more than enough, great set of filters and very flexible.


thank you


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## ceg4048 (25 Feb 2018)

Yes, I agree with Paulo.  Lightroom is fine and is less expensive than Photoshop. Also remember that it is not necessary to buy the latest edition as they are often bloated with features that you will never use and have many bugs.

Cheers,


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