Post by fishguy on Dec 29, 2011 0:45:31 GMT -6
Good luck with that.
To get a sharper focus you need to shoot with a quicker shutter speed. In general, you can't shoot hand held very well below about 1/80 of a second because you can't hold the camera still enough. Shooting close ups makes this worse, since a little movement of the lens results in a big movement across your subject. That VR lens will help a lot, but even if you hold the camera perfectly still at 1/25 of a second, any movement of the fish will blur the shot.
You can shoot at high ISO like 800 or 1600, but your shots will be grainy looking compared to 100 or 200 ISO. Looking at your shots, even the high ISO isn't enough to get the shutter speeds you need (1/200 or 1/250 of a sec would be nice).
Like always, the answer is to spend more money! You need more light on your fishes. For about $75 you can make one of those slave strobe light thingies using a piece of rain gutter and some strobes from Adorama. There's a thread on it on this site's photography section somewhere. An alternative is to get a Nikon speedlight external flash, like a used SB 600 off eBay for about $250. You can set it above the tank and aim it down, and the camera talks to it via radio control to get the right exposure. A speedlight is a lot more versatile than a gutter strip, since you can move it around and try different angles, and of course use it on top of your camera for other indoor flash photography besides fish. The gutter thing also won't talk electronically to your camera, so you will have to figure out the right camera settings when you use it, where a speedlight does all that for you. With a speedlight just set your shutter, aperture, and ISO, and fire away. BTW, there are other (cheaper) flashes that work on a Nikon camera, but I believe only the Nikon ones do the cool remote control via the "Commander Mode" on your camera.
And then once you have one speedlight, you'll wish you had another, then a macro lens, and on it goes...
