If you're using a t3i, you can adjust your white balance to make blues into white. take a bunch of pics at different WB settings and see what works. Your camera also has an auto WB setting, so you can put a piece of white paper behind your tank, use the auto WB on it, then take your pictures at that. Look through this forum, LOTS of great info on what apature/shutterspeed/ISO to use to get different styles of pictures.
If you're really going to get into it start taking pictures in RAW and use Photoshop or another program to adjust them afterwards. Generally Photoshop will do a better job than the camera adjusting it on-board while it takes pictures, but only if you know what you're doing.
As for the phone pictures, phones use a really small sensor, which makes dark photo's hard to crank up ISO on without noise, but in something as bright as our tanks they can take REALLY good shots. we did a POTM a little bit ago with phone pictures, ther was some very good shots in there.
|