Lately I have been spending most of my free time—what little there is of it—trying to improve my photo stacking technique. I just don’t seem to be able to produce consistent, high quality images. Each stacked image requires considerable time and effort to produce. I need to set up the equipment and specimen; take approximately 100 images; and then process and edit the stack. To go through all that and then repeatedly end-up with an unsatisfactory image has been more than a little frustrating…
So taking the photos for today’s blog has been both a pleasure and a relief—this is the kind of photography that I am really comfortable with!
The picture above is of a type of fish called a hillstream loach (family Balitoridae)—although you would be excused if you didn’t immediately recognize it as a fish. That’s because these are photos of the underside of the animal—taken as it moved across the surface of the glass in my aquarium. These fish are adapted to life in fast flowing water and are dorsoventrally flattened to reduce water resistance. They live by clinging to the surface of rocks and submerged objects, grazing on algae and other microorganisms. And that’s what it was doing when I took this photo…In fact if you look closely you will see tiny little dots scattered over the surface of the glass: these are green algae. Normally I would hate an aquarium photo that didn’t have utterly clean glass—it should look as if the picture was taken in the water and not through the glass. But in this case, the scattering of algae adds to the photo by providing context: it shows that the specimen is on glass while showcasing the food it is grazing on.
I purchased this specimen mainly because it is a really interesting little fish (it’s about two inches long), but I also really wanted to get a nice photo of the underside of its head (like the picture at the top of the page). I have a lot of wood, stones and plants in my aquarium, so when I put the loach into the tank it promptly disappeared. I didn’t see it again for a couple of weeks. Then yesterday it made an appearance on the front glass of the aquarium and I quickly snapped these pictures.
In case you don’t recognize what you are looking at in the photo above, I have added another (below) with a few of the fish’s body parts labelled.
This is a very pretty fish and if I ever catch it out in the open I’d love to get some nice pictures of the animal itself. But so far it has always been stuck to the glass. Today I did manage to take a few quick photos of the fish as it as hanging out on the side glass of the aquarium. They aren’t great photos, but at least you get an idea of what it looks like. Hopefully I’ll add more photos in the near future…
And now back to puzzling over photo stacking…
Cheers
EC