These beasties look, and feel like the old 35mm film cameras. They use a media card IE compact flash card or SD card, (secure digital media card), to store your images instead of film stock. These type of cameras usually offer the user a lot more control and options to fine tune your pictures, and they usually cost quite a bit more than the above compacts.

The average starting price for a good quality DSLR body only, such as a Nikon or Canon D series, is around AU$1400 -AU$1699, while a Nikon D200 is suggested at around the AU$2K body only. The Nikon D40 is cheaper but by how much I’m not entirely sure :p

Nikon do a few kits comprising of either a D40 or D80 camera body with a Nikon lens 18-135mm for the average price of approx AU$1399 and AU$2K respectively. As with all prices in shops I suggest you try and haggle hard because there is room to move!

Personally the D40 is for the absolute novice that wishes to produce quality pictures, no user setting to play with , just fully automatic. It’s only draw back is it can’t take the full range of Nikon lens as stated below. This camera will only utilize the new lenses designed for the DSLR.

I’m a one eyed Nikon man but…..read on

All Nikon cameras since the 1950’s have had what Nikon call the ‘F’ Mount. It is the standard to which Nikon produced every single Lens it ever made….so all Nikon lens fit all Nikon Cameras with the exception of the likes of the D40. Not all features will be available to all cameras with older lenses but they will fit and work perfectly well. i.e. matrix metering may be disabled with an older lens on a D200, but TTL metering will work fine…some older lenses will only work in the manual mode…but they will fit and take perfectly good photos, just a little more knowledge will be required to get there.

Matrix metering and TTL is a method most modern cameras use to calculate the light entering the lens to give just the right exposure for your picture. Some cameras have as many as 20 individual zones (controlled by a small processor called a CCD), in which the camera asses the light in every part of the picture to maximize the correct exposure.

The only exception is some of the newer lenses. They don’t have an aperture ring to control your aperture setting….this is because they are purely for use on the new DSLR’s., you know point and shoot in program mode.

What is aperture, F-stop or an aperture ring?

It is the small dial/ring on the lens near the camera (when fitted). It has numbers on it like f2.8,f3.5,f11 and so on. This ring controls the small hole inside the lens which lets in differing amounts of light according to the F number selected. It acts in exactly the same manner as the pupil in our own eye. This setting is usually only played with by more experienced photographers. In most cases Program mode will do just as good a job without the need to know anything about the aperture ring.

Shutter Speed, what is it, what does it do?

Simply it is the blade (mostly metal), inside your camera body that opens and closes at lightening speed to expose your image to the CCD or film in your camera. The shutter speed can be controlled in most DSLR’s to operate at speeds ranging from 1/10,000 sec to long exposures of 30 secs or more!

For example on a bright sunny day, you want to capture an athlete running around a track. You would need a shutter speed of at least 1/250 sec or faster to capture him/her sharply. If a slow shutter speed of say 1/30th sec was selected the athlete would be rendered blurry under normal circumstances due to his fast moving pace.

Lenses and DSLR’s

There is another important factor to remember. When using standard lenses, you have to take into account the focal range. On a normal 35mm film camera a 50mm lens is just that….a 50mm lens, but stick the same lens on a DSLR and your 50mm lens has just become a 75mm lens. This means a 200mm -500mm zoom lens on a Digital camera gives you a massive 350-750 super snooper lens.

This is not a miracle as one might think; it has to do with the calculation from the Digital CCD. The conversion rate is approx 1.55x.

Models

The Nikon D40 is the beginners’ model. Its major draw back is that it will only accept the newer lens specifically designed for the DSLR. Older lenses will probably not work on this model.
Now the D80, D200, D2x, upcoming D300 (12+ mega pixel) and the D3 also 12+ mega pixels can all take older and the new DSLR lenses.

Reviews

While there are many reviews out their widely published, the best review I can offer is here….if my Mrs can do this @ 1am with a camera she has owned for 4 hours, after reading the manual for the first 2 hours, which incidentally is a first , what else is there to know?

Here’s a few examples of her work….

Note damaged mouth on Ilangi, my male scrapper…incidentally I had no idea he had this injury until the Mrs took this!

Camera Nikon D80, Lens: Tamron SP AF Di 90mm f2.8 Macro 1:1, program defaults set. Mrs at the helm…OMG I’ve got competition!!

Lenses

As a general rule for photographing your fish, look for a macro or micro Nikkor lens with a focal length of 90mm or more, up to 180mm and a reproduction ratio of 1:1 if possible (this means it can take life size photos if you can get close enough.) Other lenses can’t focus down as close to the subject as a macro or Micro Nikkor.

Tamron, Sigma all do nice lenses for any camera, usually cheaper than say Nikon or Canon lenses. My advice would be to troll a couple of the second hand camera shops or cash converters if you know what to look for… even try the Quokka (our local trader paper).

Nowadays new lenses are all of a muchness in quality unless you buy specialist lenses.People also ask which lens I should buy. Again budget is a factor, however todays quality of lenses is extremely good.

Tamron vs. Nikon lens. I was always a Nikon man, always, especially knowing Mr Nikon WA personally. Nikon are renowned for quality lenses using quality glass.

He has recently become the state distributor for Tamron and Velbon to name a few, and after 20 years with Nikon, I trust his judgment.

He persuaded me to try the Tamron lenses after his own trials on his own D2x and D200 and he loved the results.

I have to say I’m happy with what I’ve seen so far with the results from my wife’s D80 and my own D200. The other major advantage is that the Tamron lenses are half the price of say an equivalent Nikkor lens.

For example. A micro Nikkor 105mm will set you back approx. AU$1100 give or take a few cents, where as the Tamron 90mm goes for approx. AU$600.

Again I was so impressed with the quality of the Tamron 90mm I have just purchased a second one for my wife. It arrived today. I got fed up of her stealing mine, so I bought her a lens of her own.

My Personal Opinion

I have over the years owned many brands, Mamiya 645 medium formats, Practikas (OMG did I admit that…. ) Minoltas, Canons and of course Nikon as well as early Pentax P30 and P50, the P50 I still have and treasure from 25 years ago. It’s in perfect condition with the original box!

For some reason I could never be persuaded to buy an Olympus. I recall buying a second handy in my early days and it failing so I never went there again….unfair really but there we have it.

Of them all, before Nikon, I was a Canon believer. Had many an EOS model and loved them, but I preferred the robustness of the Nikon bodies. Canon’s are much lighter and they seem to be built using more plastics in my opinion. The Nikon’s were titanium bodied.

I recall at a wedding I was shooting, had done the medium format shots on the Mamiya, picked up my Nikon F4s with SK6 flash bracket attached …mounted on top was an SB25 Nikon flash gun….and I dropped the beggar! Had it a day….AU$6,700.00 went hurtling towards the concrete with a bone crunching thud! After the shock of dropping it and my faced changed from OMG too, what do I do now, I gingerly picked it up…to find not even the paint had scratched…on anything! Everything worked perfectly; in fact you couldn’t tell it had been man handled roughly at all

From that day on it was Nikon for me.

I realize that I have harped on about Nikon over and above every other brand, as I said earlier, I’m a little bit one eyed in this area, however with over 25 years experience with picture taking and using most brands of Cameras on the market, I personally just can’t go past a Nikon.

Lighting and flash

Generally, if you take a photograph of your fish with just your aquarium light as the only source of light, you may see a green tinge or cast (or some other colour), engulf your picture. It would look like you shot it on the moon! This is because Flouro lighting doesn’t emit the same colour spectrum as our own sun. Light is usually measured in Kelvins, and daylight is approx 5000K or Kelvin. Flouros burn phosphors which change the colour of the light emitted hence the colour cast. To avoid this cast always use a flash to take your picture. This will effectively neutralize the colour cast. You can use filters but that gets more complicated and we don’t really need to know that here.

While flash can be your best friend, it can also be your worst! Flash bounce can really kill an excellent picture. The simplest way to avoid this nasty is to shoot at a slight angle to your subject and avoid head on shots to the tank’s glass.

Catching that perfect shot!

Now that I have explained the hardware side of things I should get on with some techniques for actually capturing your fish!

Personally I like to clean my glass before I start. I make sure the inside is as free of algae as possible, and that I have wiped my lil darling’s finger prints from the outside too! There’s nothing worse than capturing that near perfect shot, then shock horror, a big greasy hand print appears in your final picture….Bugga!

This one might sound silly but check your batteries before you start, the only thing worse than the above example is going to all that effort then realizing you can only get 1 or 2 shots off (if your lucky) before the camera says ‘no’ and shuts down (sorry it’s the little Britain in me )….Double Bugga!

If you are new to taking pictures, make sure you have the auto or program mode selected. This will ensure that if the light is to low, the flash will automatically pop up and help out (if you have one on your camera). For the more initiated, try settings of 1/125th sec, with an F# of around 8-16 and flash and see what you get.

For your first fishy subject try to find a slow moving or even stationary fish. If the fish is moving slowly, follow it through your view finder, keeping the fish in the frame as you move and gently squeeze the trigger AS YOU KEEP MOVING with the fish.This technique is called panning. This will let you get used to the auto focus of your camera and how it reacts. I generally put my cameras auto focus sensors as near to the eye of the fish as possible, and focus there before executing my shot. It’s no good focusing on the mid body because the shot will generally not be clear unless you have a high F stop selected and a flash to back up the F stop.

Get as close to the tank as your lens (and fish) will allow you, make sure you are sitting/standing in a comfortable position (waiting may be required), and ensure you shoot at a slight angle to your subject when using flash. With a little practice you will be pulling shots off like David Bailey!