New kids in town

[kien]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

Thanks Kien, I may take you up on that. I did try several different ways of trying to photograph him and I was hoping to use 1/125s shutter speeds but none of the details showed up (at best) or worse it was just way too underexposed to be of any use. The camera is a D70s and the lens is a 60mm Nikkor Micro lens, both of which I thought had pretty good reviews? At least in their day. An equipment upgrade is a total non option financially. I could see maybe to a faster lens though (not sure if I'm using the term right .. "faster" as in "it lets in more light therefore you can use faster shutter speeds" and not "faster AF" or whatever), if there was a good option like that, I started to do some reading up on options but .. well, no sense in torturing myself either.

Maybe the trick is not to use a macro lens for fast swimming fish..

Ya, I noticed in the EXIF that you were using the 60mm macro. That is a great lens.. for taking macros! Hehe. Generally speaking macro lenses are very slow to focus and are not great choices for action shots. They were not built to focus quickly because flowers and still life typically doesn't move quickly :-) Although, having said that, I typically shoot everything with my 100mm macro lens, but I can get away with that because my camera goes up to ISO 6400

Your terminology is correct, a "faster" lens would help, but also one that could focus faster would help too. It takes a lot of practice but panning shots help with fast moving subjects also. I suck at panning shots though. I usually just plant myself in a spot that I know the fish like to swim by often and wait for them to swim into or very close to the field of view.

If you are shooting at high ISOs often i would recommend sticking with RAW and then post processing the holy heck out of it. You'll be able to pull a lot more noise out of RAW files than processed files like jpgs. Also, if you shoot raw you can usually crank the exposure in post processing. What do you use to process/edit your photos anyway?

I just noticed that in at least one of your photos you were shooting at f/5 ? You should be able to bump that to the wide open aperture f/2.8 and gain more than twice the shutter speed. f/2.8 will be a very thin depth of field but if you shoot the tang on his side you should be able to get the whole tang into focus. Even if you don't, the other side will be out of focus but it doesn't matter because you can't see the other side, hehe. Could also try standing back just a little bit.

Finally (are you sick of me yet?? hehe), try shooting with an exposure compensation bumped down a little bit. The tang is dark, so if you have spot metering on, or even evaluative, the camera in Aperture priority mode could be trying to compensate for his dark tone, so it will try to bring in more light to even him out (which isn't really want you want it to do since he is supposed to be dark) with a slower shutter speed (needlessly). You ca also solve this by just shooting in manual or shutter priority mode to hold the shutter speed.