Canon Rebel EOS T3 settings for SPS pics

[Acroholic]

I just bought an entry level DSLR, a Canon EOS Rebel T3 that comes with an 18-55 lens.

Looking for some setup tips for taking pictures of my 465 gallon SPS reef lit by 4x 400 watt Radium halides and supplemented by VHO super actinics. I am new to DSLR photography, and my previous camera was a simple point and shoot simple digi.

Tips on settings like white balance would be appreciated. The main problem I have seen is washed out looking pics from the brightness of my halides.

I also have a 100 gallon mixed LPS/softy reef lit by 2x Radion Pros I would like to take some pictures of.

Mainly looking for some accurate color reproduction in the camera settings.

Anyone have some suggestions to get me started?

 

[gregoryleonard]

Auto white balance would be my suggestion. You may also need to shield/block some of the light coming from your MHs because the lens is seeing/reading the lights. Are you in program mode or apperture priority?

 

[Reefer831]

What kind of lens are you using? If you are using the stock one I would suggest upgrading a lens ASAP it will make a dramatic difference in everything... I also would invest in a tripod... Next one taking photos try to kill as much flow as possible… Then also you want to make sure that you are perpendicular with the glass if you go it at any type of angle you all have an extremely blurry picture... Next set your camera to either continuous shot ...or two second timer if you're on a tripod... Next set your camera to AV and set ISO to 400... The next thing you want to do is a custom color balance… You can do this into ways you can snap a photo of something white in your tank and select the option on the camera to do a custom color balance or you can go in there yourself and play with the color balance adjustments and get it to your liking… If you shoot in raw you can do a lot of this editing in Photoshop but I always like to try to get it as close as possible from the start... Next what you want to do is set your f-stop… Play around with this by taking some photos and you can easily tell what increasing and decreasing it will do… My sweet spot is usually around 13... Then after finding their sweet spot you would want to go down and adjust your exposure right below your f-stop settings... You can adjust it from left to right depending on how dark or light you want it... Honestly the best tip to give you is just go and play around with your camera settings and see what it does….You're not going to be able to break it by adjusting the settings you can always turn it back to default... There's a ton of stuff I'm probably not mentioning but you can find a ton of information on YouTube… Just type whatever your question is in the search and there usually is an answer for it