Well, one of those pictures is worth a thousand words photos...
I took this at a friends house, who runs a business maintaining ponds and tropical fish aquariums.
The fish is a parrot fish, which is a hybrid breed that itself cannot generlly breed, or so I'm told. :-).
The photo was taken in a light tent, on the bench in his workshop. I'll post a pic of the setup after the challenge, along with my 'test' outake using a plastic fish that looked sooooo much better than this.
The fish wasn't as bright as I wanted, and the water tinted orange from his reflection. My white paper backdrop got crumpled in the car so I had to do quite a bit of editing to get it solid white again.
There was a dark reflection down the front of the glass from the opening in the light tent, and I forgot to bring the 'flap' to velcro into the gap...
Anyway, editing was in the gimp:
- Slight rotation,
- Levels/curves/levels/curves select background, levels curves, manually edit mask for background, levels.... You get the idea. It was pretty close to white to start with, but because the subject was so light it had to be done selectively.
- Select the fish, USM to bring out scale detail, sauration boost.
- Select the 'darker' reflection on the glass and tint white slightly to make it less obvious.
- Spot edited some droplets off the glass rim
- Scaled, sharpened, saved for web..
- Phew.
A lot more editing that I'd normally do on a photo, but because the 'test' one came out so well I was determined to enter with this idea.
Nice. :-) Remindy me to my screen saver (Mopy Fish), as far as I know, Mopy is a parrot fish, too. I did not know anyway, that in real life they have the same nice smile. Great capture, I like this!
Great shot Chris! He almost looks like he's got a smile on his face. I can imagine this image being featured in an article about keeping tropical fish in too small tanks!
Just for the record, the glass is huge, it holds an entire 750ml bottle of wine, and the parrot fish could actualy move around quite well, although he only spent about 10 minutes in his room with a view. :-).
LOL Gret shot, it is a tad bit too bright (wishy washy?) tho and would be better with a bit more contrast and les brightness, make it pop more. Good luck!
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