Fishing Photography Tips Post

[BigEbass]

So I am a photography enthusiast - an amateur - only have taken a couple courses and read too many books on the subject.

Fish Chris's recent post inspired me to open a discussion about some good basic fishing photography tips for most of us.

Fist of all - lets talk hardware.  To contrary belief - you DO NOT need an expensive camera to take quality fishing photos.  Point and shoot cameras offer these days high resolution shots and a fair amount of ability to get creative (that is to change out of plain old auto mode) to get the shot you desire.  So many people own point and shoots and have no idea how to use them to their fullest.  You go into the best buy these days and you say "I want to take the best photos I can" - oh and they just have to steer you to SLR's - not that an SLR's dont have their place - but for most of you fisherman out there that barely know anything about photography - it is a waste of time - unless you just really do want to get more into photography - in that case SLR's have their place.  But a 2K dollar SLR set in auto mode on your boat is really nearly the same tool as a point and shoot camera set in auto mode - they will for the most part take the same quality photo.

So my comments will be disregarding tips as it relates to SLR usage and more of a focus on point and shoots, cause face it, that and a cell phone camera are what most of you will be using. 

Lets talk lighting - its all about lighting:

1) Overcast days - now if you go look through your photos you have previously taken, you may find that photos on overcast days tend to come out the clearest and sharpest with all details preserved.  You can thanks those clouds for that - they disperse the light from the sun evenly across everthing making for a "technically good exposure" - that is you can see all the details in the photo - no areas are too bright to the point details are lost - you see this  more in your sunny day shots at times - well talk about that in a sec.

Two primary problems I can think of about overcast days and fishing photos. 

One is insufficient light.  Lets say its earlin in the AM or late in the day and heavy overcast - there is perhaps too little light relatively - in a standard auto mode of you point and shoot or even using your blackberry - you may find your photos blurry, not "tack sharp".  For the most part this can be averted by either forcing the flash to go off (take flash off auto mode to some form of always flash mode if it exists) - or more importantly - keep a steady hand - and what I do with my point and shoot when taking such photos - I set its self timer on a 1 or 2 second delay - this ensures that the photo is taken after you depress the button so that you dont get "camera shake" when you press the button with too much gusto - this happens to people all the time - try and not press the button so dramatically - it doesnt take much  .   Low light situations are trickly for photography - I am not gonna elaborate too much on it - have a steady hand (or a tripod), try to use flash if needed....

I am not going to talk about night shots at this point - but in general with a point and shoot you will just have to point and shoot - hard to escape that flash light look in such an environment.

Second problem with overcast days is the boring overcast sky in your shot.  If you take the photo and include much of the sky in a heavy overcast situation, the exposure might be just fine, but that 20% of the photo made up of overcast is a void, a nothingness, its very blah and featureless - getting it?  Solution?  Recognize this fact and dont include it in your composition, or if you notice it later - crop it out using a crop tool of some sort after the fact (camera offer cropping tool most times if you have no clue how to crop on your computer).

Now lets talk about when the sun is up and out in our photos.  We will talk dawn and dusk in a moment - I am gonna start with mid-day situation - the sun is out and "harsh" - harsh means in this case that it really lights up light colors in your photos - and most times to the detriment of your photo.  This is a situation that MOST OFTEN ruins peoples fishing photos IMO.  How do we avoid this?

Well, lets talk about "exposure a bit" - a camera can only record a certain range of brightness detail when you are holding your 10 lb bass - so in this situation you may have areas brightly light by the sun directly that are light colored or white, and say your T shirt is brown or black.  You point, you shoot - what do you get?  Usually you get the lighter areas "blown out" - that is to say, they are so bright, that they actually have no detail - when you print the photo these bright areas are actually simply the color of your white printing paper - there is little or no detail there.  Obviously this isnt what we want.  So what I do? First of all, if you can find shade - then you avoid this problem alltogether - shooting in heavy shade will avoid this "harsh exposure" - more likely you can if possibly put the sun behind the subject (depending on time of day) - careful shooting into the sun though - if the suns rays are at a angle to your lens, you will get "lens flare" - otherwise experiment with different angles depending on where the sun is at in the sky - if it is 12pm blue bird skies, you will just have to take the shot likely or find shade.

Oh, and when taking photos druing the daytime - if your camera has an "always flash" function - its pretty much a good idea - it will eliminate shadows to a degree under the eyes for a better photo - my point and shoot does not offer such a function - stupid camera - one of the times direct flash use is acutally very helpful is actually during the day - use of it in low light ruins many photos.

In these harsh lighting scenarios you may need to make an adjustment in your camera - I will not given many of such pointer to avoid confusion for many of you.  But this one may help.  You have a function in your camera that will adjust "exposure" - without getting technical, it will adjust the amount of light allowed to enter the camera for your exposure.  So in a given shot, if areas are too bright, you can dial down the exposure - you may then find that some areas become darker, maybe even too dark, this is where you will need to decide what exposure works for YOU then.  I want my fish in that scenario to be in perfect detail so I focus on the fish - if other parts of the scene are too dark - oh well....sometimes you have to choose - and if you let the camera choose in full auto, it will soemtimes choose your black shirt details to keep and your fish and your light colored shirt end up the color of your printer paper - aka a crappy fishing photo.  So the auto mode on your point and shoot do not always get it right - YOU CAN CHANGE THAT by dialing up or down the "exposure" feature of your point and shoot - give it a whirl. (note that you have some lattitude in adusting exposure after you take the picture via use of some form of editing program such as Picasa, photoshop, or whatever program you have know how to use - but I wont get into that at this point - but you may want to at some point)

"The Magic Hour"....I call both the early AM and late evening "the magic hour" - in this situation, the sun is near the horizon and much of its harshness is blunted and that golden light cast DIRECTLY on your subject - on your face - and on your fish is pleasing this time around - so alls you have to do is position your self with the fish allowing this ligt to hit you and take the photo - if you take the same photo with the sun behind you, your face will be too dark - if you take it with the sun on your side, this may work and sometimes look even better - just try - there is no one size fits all.....

Fill the frame - fill the photo with you and the fish - unless there is some wonderful background detail - fill your photo IN THE CAMERA with your subject - failing to do so in camera and cropping later can perhaps cause loss of detail later.  I will not get into focal lenght or perspecitves much - others can talk about that - we all know that if you hold the fish up closer to the lens it appears larger - the extent of this may depend on your cameras lens etc....but those are more finite details.

Note that if you do some of these things, you will get much better photos.  Please note that most cell phone cameras are simply not high enough resolution, I try not to use them and rather use a point and shoot camera that has adequate resolution. But even in using your cell phone camera, the lighting principles are the same and will allow you to take better photos.

If you do not understand some of these ideas, a more expensive camera will not fix such botched shots - even photoshop cannot really fix totally lost areas of detail in most cases.

Anway, I am no expert by far - so take my points with a grain of salt, add to them, ammend them, clarify them, ask a question if you like - hope this all will help a few of you.

Check out my photo.net site for fun if you like - again I am only a big amateur - so nothing really special - take care.

[BigEbass]

woops forgot the link to my photo site:

http://photo.net/photos/Ellery

[BigEbass]

Also, as any digital file, these photos are susceptable to losing via a crashing computer or something like that - get a double or triple type of backup for your media folks - all your precious photos you have saved on your hard-drive could be lost in one fail swoop!!

Also I will say on that same note that some of you take photos on your 8GB memor card and NEVER take them off onto your computer.  DONT DO THAT - copy them onto your hardrive at a minimum - cards can break or fail - losing all data (essentiallY) - also the memory cards really need to be formatted on a regular basis to keep them running smooth.

[Wayne P.]

Thanks

Another equipment suggestion is to get a digital video camera with a remote control that takes still shots as well as video.

With that equipment, you can turn the view screen towards you and compose the shot before hitting the remote snapshot botton. Or you can take a short video, play it back later and choose which frame of the video to use as a still picture.

The zoom range of a simple video camera far exceeds any manageable still camera.

You will have a video camera with you in case the opportinity arises that a video would be a desired format. I had such as case a couple of years ago when a bear was swimming across the lake where I was fishing.

[Marty]

I've been a long-time advocate of using flash on sunny days, to reduce shadows, illuminate backlit subjects and the like. I usually remove my sunglasses as well to avoid that light spot from the flash.

[tbird]

Good photography tips , Thanks

                  T

[Fish Chris]

Hey BigE, good write up.

I'll go even one step further, and say that a DSLR for fish photos, is likely to even "hurt" your chances of getting a good photo. Don't get me wrong, if a guy wants to go crazy with creativity, and spend tons of money on great lenses, the sky is the limit. However, DSLR's have a much steeper learning curve, and furthermore, are much more critical, about their settings, and WAAY easier to take a shot which is out of focus, due to the much shallower depth of focus.

And yes, I ALWAYS use flash during my daytime shots... as well as my low light, or night shots, albeit, for two different reasons.

Oh, and friends, don't let friends use camera phones   LOL

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One more important thing BigE, you didn't mention taking photos of ones self, by ones self. I don't know how many of you fish by yourself, but I fish by myself 99+% of the time (by choice) and so I needed to learn how to take my own photos.

Believe it or not, with the right camera, I find this easier to do, than to have somebody else take my photos for me.

In fact, taking my own shots, I have everything set manually, and dialed in to spot on. While when I have to hand the camera to somebody else, I often have to "dumb it down" by switching to full auto, and just hoping for the best.

Without going into a big long explanation, and hijacking BigE's thread, let me just say this;

If you can still find a Canon A630, A640, or A650is, used on Ebay or somewhere, get with me... maybe even by phone, and I'll guide you through a complete camera setup up, that you can save in the "C" custom mode.

Do you like my fish photos ? Okay, it will be exactly like having me with you, on every trip

And just remember, you can tell them, "I caught a huge bass, yada, yada, yada................." and people will most often just look at you with a blank stare, and nod there head {like, sure you did buddy } but as soon as you break out the photo album, or iPod (soon to be iPad) and start showing them photos, they get all whacked ! OMG ! Hey George, come look at this ! Wow ! Ooooh ! Ahhhh ! That always cracks me up It's like, "Dude, I just told you all about these fish, and you barely raised an eyebrow... now I "show" them to you, and you come unglued !?!? You didn't think I was just blowing smoke, did you ?   LOL

Peace,

Fish

[stratos 375]

just to add to the thread, I fish alone all of the time, one of the first things I do is set up a tripod on the back deck, pre-focus the camera and have it ready to shoot by way of the timer.

Up here in Pa. , from mid april to mid June, you have to return bass to the water " immediately and unharmed" during those times, so there's no stowing them in the livewell for a group photo later,  if you want a pic, you gotta be ready to photo and release within about 30 seconds of catching.

[Paul Roberts]

Good thread. Thanks, BigE.

I'll add something to the pot:

http://www.bassresource.com/bass_fishing_forums/YaBB.pl?num=1218589384/0

[BigEbass]

Olympus as far as I can tell have a real corner on that market - I had one of those olympus jobs - brought it snorkeling on our honeymoon - it worked like a charm and its a pretty tough camera - mine ended up having a problem and I returned it, but I would buy one again and a fried of mine had a "water resistant" model - these are cheaper, durable - can be rained on, splashed on etc without messing up - I recommend these for the tighter budget, although the fully waterproof version has  likely came down in price at this point?  Anyway, olympus is good in that regard!

On the issue of flash again - definately try to always use it for bright sunny days - many people dont understand this - the sun produces shadons on the face that are not pleasing and a flash can eleminate or reduce the shadows there depending on the conditions.  It is important to recognize that the little flash from your point and shoot may simply NOT have enough power to do much to hard shadows on a very sunny day with the sun directly overhead - the flash is just not that powerful.  I have not gotten into this cause I doubt many of you would do it, but any old light colored poster board set up to reflect some light into the subject's face would help tremendously in this harsh light scenario - but if you are by yourself that could be tricky - so just keep that nugget in your mind perhaps as an FYI - using a reflector (I recommend light grey foam core board or white 4 bucks at CVS).  But use the flash non-the-less - it may help a bit, but remember it will noticibly help for less harsh shadows that are common as well - on cloudy days it just depends - the flash in certain cloudy conditions could make your photo look un-natural, try both and see what works for you - unfortunately most point and shoots do not have the abillity to change the flash value.  Sunglasses and glasses can be an issue as far as a light reflecting, but many times you can get away with it if you angle the shot a bit - I like to leave my glasses/sunglasses in most cases.

Fish Chris - I purposefully left out the setup issues you mention - if you go it alone you will need some sort of small tripod for sure - most cameras have a feature to lock prefocus, but during most daytime shots, the camera in auto with auto focus will do fine - especially in most daytime uses where the f stop may be automatically set as high as f12-f32.  Anyway, I think many point and shoots have timer functions as well as multiple shot functions where you set it up and it will take 3 shots in a row with 2 sec breaks in between shots - that is a really nice feature here in this application to have. 

Fish Chris also mentioned changing "manual settings" to his liking - I am not familiar with the camera he uses, but I believe he is talking about a camera that will allow YOU to more directly change shutter speed, aperture, etc. to change the "exposure".  I do not recommend this for most people that I am targeting fot this post.  Most point and shoots do not allow you to make such specific changes (well not exactly, I wont get into details) - what most should do rather is use the "exposure adjustment" feature - what this feature does is change the shutter speed and aperture for you to get a certain exposure - you just dial up or down the exosure to get the exposure that works - this will be much more more simple for everyone out there.  And fish's setup whil it is all pre-setup - will still require some tweaking of those manual exposure features to get the desired exposure depending on the lighting in the scene.

As far as video used and getting a still from a video, it is my understanding (and I could be wrong) that a still from a video feed is simply lower quality than is a still from a camera photo....photos are still better, plus you really do get a huge benefit from use of flash that you will not get from a still from video, but I am sure it would be a great tool to have in your arsenal - but for my PB - I would want some great photos, and video would be nice (but not necessary for me personally, thats just preference).

Oh and hijack away people, thats what the post is for!!

[BigEbass]

And let me just re-iterate this - most peoples shots are crummy for a few distince reasons.  But primarily its due to OVER-exposure due to the harsh sun - you have to manage this better as discussed.  Also it may be due to camera shake or a blurry photo - most times fixed by a steady hand or a tripod really as discussed (or you can prop it on something).  If you get the lighting right, you can point and shoot in auto and mostly be pleased with the result.  But learn the exposure feature at a minimum and tinker with it - it will pay off.

[brushhoggin]

nice pics paul

you too big e

[BigEbass]

FYI - the olympus I believe you are refering to is available in a few different models - about 300 bucks now - I am surprised the price did not come down a bit more.  I am cheap so I would stick with a weather resistant model, but if you want the underwater stuff, go for it.

[Paul Roberts]

I don't use flash very often. For bright sun with shadows, or if I'm taking a pic with the subject filling the frame, like an angler holding a fish, I'll use fill flash.

What I want to avoid is the bright "flashed" fish and dark background look I too often get. Maybe the fill flash on my camera's are too strong? I tend to meter on the fish and then shoot without flash. I also like the mood natural light can often cast, even if the pics are a bit soft.

[BigEbass]

I don't use flash very often. For bright sun with shadows, or if I'm taking a pic with the subject filling the frame, like an angler holding a fish, I'll use fill flash.

What I want to avoid is the bright "flashed" fish and dark background look I too often get. Maybe the fill flash on my camera's are too strong? I tend to meter on the fish and then shoot without flash. I also like the mood natural light can often cast, even if the pics are a bit soft.

Paul, flash is a complicated topic.  You will hear people talk about natural light as looking better than flash....what really should be said is that good lighting is good lighting, bad lighting is bad lighting, no  matter what the source.  People that do alot of flash photography can make beautiful images - and I am a big propent of using strobes - but realize that the little flash on your point and shoot does tend to ruin photos in lower light situations - giving you the "flash light" look - with as you said perhaps the fish and you bright and the background too dark.

Most of my comments/suggestions I have made so far have assumed a pretty decent amount of background light - so balancing flash becomes less difficult.  For example - if it is very very sunny casting hard shadows, that point and shoot flash will not really affect the exposure much at all (unless perhaps you are up really really close for a head shot) - but for many daytime shots "fill flash" with undesirable shadows is usually helpful and will give a balanced exposure in that scene - you can hit someone pretty hard with flash in the middle of day and not get too  "unnatural" of lighting.

Flash is a tricky subject - balacing flash with available light is too much to get into for this thread - it really requires a more advanced camera that is able to adjust flash value or the direction of the flash (ie a detachable flash head which I have two  ).

Let me step back and say this - if it is fairly bright outside, I think that in most cases use of flash will only help (in most cases).  Now if it is very early in the AM or late in the evening - flash will produce the flash light appearance...my suggestions for these lower light scenarios are as such:

1) if there is some sun during such times on the horizon, position your subject facing this nice golden light - it will in these cases not be too harsh of a light, then shoot WITHOUT flash.

2) Another thing to try in lower light scenarios is to use the camera's version of "slow sync" flash photography - this is usually termed "night mode" on your camera - it is good for such low light situations in which you want to use flash perhaps, but not get the flash light look - what the camera does is use a slow shutter speed to get the background exposure - then it fires a poof of flash at the END of the exposure to light the subject and also freeze it. 

Another problem with flash during the golden hour is that the flash is not "golden" - it is white - so if you are a real nerd about theses golden hour shots - you can buy some CTO gel (clear to orange) or even some form of clear orangish material at party city and tape it over your flash on your point and shoot to match the available light to the flashes color - but again - this is getting into more detail, heh heh

[BigEbass]

I don't use flash very often. For bright sun with shadows, or if I'm taking a pic with the subject filling the frame, like an angler holding a fish, I'll use fill flash.

What I want to avoid is the bright "flashed" fish and dark background look I too often get. Maybe the fill flash on my camera's are too strong? I tend to meter on the fish and then shoot without flash. I also like the mood natural light can often cast, even if the pics are a bit soft.

yep - your flash is too strong, but it also has to do with the background.  See in auto mode, your point and shoot with the flash on say at twighlight time - your camera will choose a shutter speed to expose for your flashed subject - perhaps it will choose for you a shutter speed of 1/200 - in auto you are telling the camera to freeze the subject and light it with the flash - in this mode, the background becomes unimportant and is NOT exposed for.  Solution - again use some available light if it exists to fill shadows (reflector or simply turn your subject) or if too little light is available pop your camera in night mode or slow sync mode - in this mode it will first expose the scene properly as if it were NOT using flash - this gives a balanced background exposure - that same exposure shot without flash though would come out very blurry due to the low shutter speed - but the camera at the end of the exposure emitts the flash and that flash basically creates another exposure on top of the background exposure which turns out usually to be very sharp or acceptably sharp (depending on how dark it is) - a tripod in this mode is advisable due to the low shutter speed it must use.  But if you want to get creative you can shoot in night flash mode and handhold it, even shake it - you can get some cool results - like a bright blurred background and a sharp subject with light trails - now that would be a cool fishing pic - thats the kinda stuff that I love about photography - ok I am getting too much into it