Aquarium shooters here ?
 

Hi @all !

I am new to the group and enjoy reading here since two weeks. Great board to gain knowledge from folks who use the cams regularly.

Having way to many fish tanks with tropical marine fish and being a breeder I use extensively my Canon D40 to take pictures, but this is starting to get me bored and I want to move to video. As I give lectures and publish my pictures the personal quality standard is set to high ;)

Therefore the current cam vote is for the FX1000 as I believe it provides plenty of features I can use.

Anyone here who had practical experience with capturing videos of fish and corals?

Take care,

Peter

Hi Peter. While I have shot at an aquarium with a Betacam, I haven't had an opportunity to do it with any HDV camera yet. I am really looking forward to have an opportunity to do it. I think any of these HDV cameras would look fantastic, especially one like the FX1000. But I can still give you one hint. Turn off the tally (record) light on the front of the camera so you don't have a strange glowing red dot in all of your video footage.

I shot a clip of my breeder tank with my PD170 a month ago when one of my mollies had babies. Focus was a real pain (they are small and fast) but I had time on my hands and wanted to share a clip with my aquarium friends on an aquarium board. The thing I also noticed is tall tanks are not 16x9 friendly (I shot some images of my main tank and it didn't work out so good.) Anyways, if you're interested here is a link to the clip.
Nursury640.flv video by AquaBry - Photobucket

Thanks for your answers - good tip with tally light ;)

Keeping the fish on focus will be the trick part. I have more then 30 tanks running and could make tons of videos - yes, I am nuts :D

Peter, maybe you could go hog wild with the lighting, make a real production out of it, and make swimming fish dvds and sell the DVDs at local pet stores...market them as TV for cats. Just for fun.

If they were nice, and you found a local store to sell them, you would need to package them nicely, and I would almost guarantee you would sell a few...cat lovers will sometimes buy ANYTHING for their cats. Use some sooting royalty free music...this is of course NOT an origninal idea, but might be fun project.

Jeff,

as I sell my breeding fish to the biggest European wholesaler and my name is known in the fish world this would be probably possible. BUT having a full time job (somebody has to pay for all the fish), breeding marine fish as a side business and (still :D ) having a girl friend, time is really the culprit here. So I guess the videos will most likely be more for fun and my lectures. Although ... there is a Web Aqua TV which contacted me already ... one never knows ;)

Next would be (???): Making video's of grass, growing . .
Just kidding.

Everyone needs a hobby. And if it can generate some cash, why not aquarium video. Heck, I shoot trains, both real ones and model layouts, in HD and SD. To each his own :)

Mike