Couple of new non-Macro (for a change) :)

[astrogazer]

I know it's still a little blue, but I liked the effect. This is my newest addition. A Vietnamese Toadstool Leather that I just aquired from my favorite LFS.

http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i72/djpalliser/e99cd6f8.jpg



A few have been asking for a full tank shot and I have never had one in my shot inventory, really don't know why, but here it is.

http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i72/djpalliser/d8ac8bdc.jpg



Couple of misc.

http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i72/djpalliser/76a68e22.jpg

http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i72/djpalliser/2e0e8778.jpg

[ReefNuggets]

great pics...whats that first fish?

[hyacinth]

Nice! How do you create the effect of a black background?

[astrogazer]

To be honest I don't know what type of fish that is, I'm photographing some inventory for a LFS.


The black background ... Everything I shoot gets processed in Photoshop, some more than others. To alter the background you have to control it, so I make an alpha mask of the fish and save it as a layer. Select the inverse, which in the case will be the background, the I use a gausian blur filter, set to about 150 (which is a LOT of blur), I then adjust contrast and brightness to the still selected background.The black background ... Everything I shoot gets processed in Photoshop, some more than others. To alter the background you have to control it, so I make an alpha mask of the fish and save it as a layer. Select the inverse, which in the case will be the background, the I use a gausian blur filter, set to about 150 (which is a LOT of blur), I then adjust contrast and brightness to the still selected background to get the desired effect, then I reload my fish mask (I want to hide the hard edge that may remain from the blur), modify your selection by making it a 6 pixel border, then I feather this and apply a minor guasian blur to this edge of about a radius of 4.5, don't forget the decimal, just a slight blur. You can HIDE the selection layer to view the results as you may need to adjust the brightness and/or contrast to match your background effect.
After a while these steps can be mastered and near seamless results can be had. The real trick is in not going too far and getting a good initial mask of the fish.

[astrogazer]

wow, sorry about that, my laptops keyboard is taking a dump

[astrogazer]

nevermind, it let me fix my post, but wouldn't let me delete the one above.

[louist]

Some nice photos there!

To isolate the subject against a bacl background, in camera, what you do is set a shutter speed and aperture that totally eliminate ambient light (or lighting from tank), I say 1/200s, f8 is a good start, and do flash exposure lock on the subject (FEL). I would post an example for you, but it's not exactly an underwter creature, but I could probably lie and say it's a nudibranch from antarctica :D