Photo Features!

Alright, so I've been meaning to start this up, I just wasn't sure how. And now I've figured out how... so here it is:

Every week (or maybe every two... depends how well this works out) I'm going to feature three new photos. These might be photos I find on Flickr or dA or some other photo site, or they might be photos from you guys that you've sent me, or photos that you guys have found somewhere. I'm looking for good photos of bettas - any kind, any gender, any age. The more original the photo is, the more likely I am to feature it. Once I've chosen photos to feature, I'll post them and give credit to the person who took the photo as well as the person who found it - unless it's me, because that's just redundant.

So... if you've got photos, or know someone else who has photos, link me.

I think I'll start doing features every Friday or something...

Alpha and his bubble nest

Alright, so I keep on saying I'll add photos of Alpha... and here he is. He's much happier since I moved him to the 2.5 gallon - he's much bigger than any of my other fish, so he needs the extra space. In the 1 gallon he just kinda... sat there... But now he's happy and I had fun taking pictures. He even flared at the camera! Unfortunately I wasn't focused properly and that photo's just kinda a blur... so it's not here. I'll try and get another one sometime.

And yes that's a beer bottle, even though beer is disgusting... I needed to put something in the tank and the bottle was there XP If you're going to use that idea, make sure you clean out the bottle really well and fill it part way with gravel or something, especially if you don't have any ground cover, and fill it with water.

And today I came home and went to feed him and there was a bubble nest! It's not a very big one, but I've never seen one in person before... so I was really excited. I'm going to try breeding him... with Maddi, I think... when I have the space and time. Also have to wait for a little tear in one of Maddi's fins to heal - think it was a bit of an ammonia burn, I didn't have time to do any cleaning on the day I normally would have cleaned all the tanks out so I had to leave it an extra day.

Pictures!

Ok... so I took about twenty photos of each of my fish... and failed miserably at focusing most of them. So here are the half decent ones. There are more of Specks than anyone else because every time I take the lid off her tank she thinks I'm going to feed her, which makes her a lot easier to photograph. And some of them are over-edited because the lighting's crap.


These are all my betta tanks.


This is where I keep my brine shrimp... yay live food!

Rest are coming up in slideshows made by Photobucket... because Ocie is lazy today.

Dummy tips for photographing fishies

Alright - I have seen way too many horrible photos today. If you want to photograph your fish with a digital camera and really only know how to use auto modes, here's what you do:

1. Turn off the flash - it'll reflect and your photo will be a big ball of light. Of course, without the flash, you might need to bring in some other lights.
2. Use the macro setting. It might be called close up or have a little tulip icon on the button.
3. Get really close to the tank or bowl or whatever, you can even put the lens right up against the glass.
4. Usually, you can push the shutter down half way and it'll focus and then all the way to take the photo. This is extremely useful with macros because if you're on an auto setting it very rarely focuses where you want it to.
5. Turn on the screen on your camera if you have one, it'll make this easier to do (and I will never, ever tell anyone who's actually trying to learn to use a camera properly to use the screen, just so you know).
6. Push the shutter down halfway like I said. On the screen there will usually be a box or something showing where you're focused. If it's not where you want it to be, move the camera until it is, still holding the shutter halfway down - you may also have to move it forward or backwards to actually get what you want in focus.
7. Push the shutter down all the way... and check how successful you were.

Is that simple enough?