My second attempt at shooting animals-Lighting conditions were worse than before

[jvgig]

These were shot at the Georgia Aquarium. Many of the exhibits had very low light and the glass reflected everything from flashes to people, but I tried anyways. About 70% of my pics went straight for the recycle bin upon viewing.

1.

9mm f8 1/320sec iso400
2.

36mm f3.5 1/25sec iso400
3.

36mm f3.5 1/80sec iso400
4.

9mm f2.5 1/20sec iso400
5.

7mm f3.5 1/60sec iso400
6.

30mm f3.5 1/25sec iso400

These were shot with an Olympus C-8080. The camera is little on the old side and only goes up to iso400, which proved to be a problem.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[jvgig]

Any thoughts? I know they are noisy, but I really dont see anyway around that based on the lighting regulations and camera.

 

[Overread]

Firstly well done for shooting such subjects - very tricky to get right due to bad lighting and lalso the lack of flash power. I think some people use a diffuser on their flash to try and help break up the harsh light and lose the reflections.
As for ISO - I think on the camera going higher with ISO would add way too much noise to your shots - 400 is already very noisy
Out of interest what post production are you doing ot these and with what software?

 

[jvgig]

Thanks

#1 & #2 are straight off the camera. #5 was cropped. #3, #4, #6 had some cloning to remove some reflections and unnatural looking parts of the habitats.

My 30day trial for Photoshop ran out about a week ago, so I am back to Gimp. (sigh)

 

[Overread]

ever thought of photoshop elements 6 or lightroom. Both are cheaper alternatives and for elements there is a whole host of downloads you can get to give it some features of the full version of photoshop.
As for GIMP its supposed to have a lot of power = but its hard to find guides for, most stuff in in photoshop

 

[jvgig]

I will probably try to pick up lightroom in the near future as it can be retained after I get photoshop down the road. The features in gimp are not reason I do not really like it. It does almost everything that I want it to, but in comparison to photoshop, so much of the interface and menus just seem so unintuitive. I find that I move the various windows around a lot and loose the tool bars from time to time. I am not too fond of the GTK+ environment either, it really hurts memory performance, but such is the price you pay for free software. Maybe I will just switch to a linux distro and go all freeware until I can afford all the adobe software (photoshop, lightroom, illustrator, and premiere: yeah, it will be a while) that I want. I was accepted to a local art magnet school for next year that deals with the adobe product line so maybe I can get a good discount.

Is there anyway to give the animals a more natural color when shooting through water? I tried playing with white balance but couldn't get it quite right when shooting through several meters of water. #1, #2, #5 look fairly natural as they were all less than 1/2 m from the glass, but #3, #4, and #6 all have the characteristic blue overtone. The beluga was about 5m away and the whale sharks were in the range of 15-30m.