My Nano Busted!

[bluegrasssweety]

I know. I just don't like looking at an empty tank.
I tried one of the mollies, but it didn't make it through the
acclamation process.

[bluegrasssweety]

I have my new tank up and running and ready to go. Here are some pictures. A friend was letting me put my rock in his tank until I got this one going and now I have a couple of aiptasia in my tank.

[bluegrasssweety]

Please excuse the pictures they were taken with my phone.

[bluegrasssweety]

Does anyone know how I can get a picture without the light glare on the rocks? I tried lifting the lid to get the lights from shining directly on it, but that didn't work.

[gwen_o_lyn]

Your tank looks good!! Try and get the aiptasia before they are out of control- you can shoot them with a kalk/water paste mixture. I had good luck with peppermint shrimp too.

I have the same problem taking photos of my 12g that has a 150w mh- everything on the top comes out bright white- I usually have better luck taking photos with the moonlights.

I'd like to know what the trick is also!

[GeorgeW]

Picture-wise, your problem is probably that the light meter on your camera is reading a generalized value. In the bleached out pic above, about 1/4 to 1/3 of the pic is brightly lit, but almost 1/2 is dark.

If you have a spot-metering capability see if you can spot-read off the bright spots. Another possibility is if you have white balance, you can crank down the aperture that way by giving it +1, +2, etc F-stops that will darken the bleached spots. Or you can put the camera on manual and crank up the aperture value manually to compensate.

If you fill the image more with the bright part, you'll get a better exposed picture as well.

The greatest thing about digital cameras is that trial-and-error costs nothing.

[bluegrasssweety]

Thanks Gwen!

George, I tried messing with the white balance and in the +2 & +3 range everything was green. The bright spots were still bright just green. I don't have alot of settings to mess with because it is a cell phone. My digital camera was stolen a couple of months ago.

[bluegrasssweety]

Or was is blue? one of the two

[GeorgeW]

Unfortunately, cell phone cameras are notoriously cheap both on the CCD and the lens. That blue-green cast may be an inability of your camera to balance out wavelengths that are over-represented by aquarium lights. Hard to say.

I misspoke on the white balance. Exposure compensation is what I was thinking of. It's typically used to compensate for grey-ish whites (not enough exposure) and charcoal-ish blacks (too much exposure) caused by bad light meter readings. You can underexpose pictures to turn the bright spots more visible, but you'll loose the dark spots to black. However color balance is probably too sophisticated for a camera phone.