I've been trying for almost a year now to get decent pictures of my fish. I've borrowed every digital camera in my family, gone through several 35 mm cameras, and the only camera I've gotten that really works is an old (but expensive at the time) 19mm that I can't get film for anymore and a very expensive 35 mm Minolta. I picked up a couple different types of disposable cameras today to test those (didn't consider that the flash can't be turned off on most of them, so I've got electrical tape over the flash).
Every camera either can't focus close enough, or will delay a second for autofocus (by which time the fish is long gone), some can't get pictures without the flash (with the flash, it just reflects off the glass and nothing else shows up), even in my high light tanks (another consideration here is that they basically have to run off tank lights - the flash or room lighting creates glare on the glass which spoils pictures), and others get motion blur from even slight movement.
This is an example of the best pictures I've managed to get:
For reference, the crayfish is around 5 inches long, and the picture was taken from about two feet away, zoomed to fit him in the frame. Most of my fish are in the 1-4 inch range and won't cooperate as well as this guy does.
Is there an affordable digital cameras that can handle this?
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Shooting small, fast fish is a tricky operation for an experienced macro photographer with a DSLR, good, fast macro lenses and proper macro lighting. With the fish being behind glass and with no proper lighting directed at them, this will be a very annoying and difficult procedure to do with the equipment you have.
Maybe stick the camera in the tank, set with the timer?
Not really. Not enough room in most of my tanks to work with, and with any unfamiliar object in the tank, half of the fish will be hiding and the other half will be trying to see if it's food.
I have tried the macro function, though the above picture wasn't taken with it. Like Dark Moon says, that generally has come down to lighting, all the cameras I've borrowed are completely unable to get a shot through glass in macro mode, with the exception of the Sony I have right now, which can't get them in focus if the target is moving. It's actually taken some decent pictures of my gouramis and angelfish, but everything else is a blurr and my shoal of lemon tetras looked like I'd just peed in the tank. Autofocus helps, but only if the fish doesn't move for a second, which aside from the two I mentioned, usually means they're dead.
Here's an example of what I've managed with that. Being an angelfish, she does spend a reasonable amount of time doing nothing, like this. It's a short list of fish I can get to sit still long enough for this camera to get a shot this good. There's a second fish in the picture if you can find it, a pearl danio or praecox rainbowfish I think - that's about how everything else shows up. If I can get something as good as this angelfish picture with my more active fish, I'd probably be satisfied.
Ooh this gives me an idea. Shoot at a slightly higher f-stop (f/8 or so) from a few feet back with a high MP camera (6MP+) at a wide focal length (get the whole tank in the shot). Prefocus on the glass itself (though as long as you're close you'll have buckets of depth of field to keep the fishy sharp) and, because you'll have massive amounts of light, shoot at a high shutter speed and low ISO. Then just crop the final product down to the desired size. Unless you want larger than 4"x6" prints or have desktop size digital files, you should still have piles of resolution to play with even after such a ridiculous crop because of the MP count and the low ISO noise.
Basically, do what saltiness says but there's a slightly more laid out method of doing it.
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Macro mode is still giving crap for the most part, though I did manage this by adding a second double strip of lights:
I can't get the brightness in hand, it's either bright like this or very dark - I shouldn't have deleted the picture I got of my mollies, since that showed that pretty well. I managed a half-decent picture of a syno, but very little aside from angelfish or gouramis are recognizable using macro mode.
Going on Dark Moon's methods, I did manage to work up this: Cropping didn't come out terribly well, but the wide shots are coming out great and look reasonably well scaled down. These are the settings: -1.7 EV, 0.5m fixed focus, ISO 400, and auto everything turned off.