Radion Setting for Tank photography

[ReefBeez]

While recently trying to take upclose photos of my clownfish, anenome and other inhabitants, I found the photos turned out too blue. Before I just start fiddling with the settings, does anyone have some settings for the Radion that are good for high quality upclose photos of their tank inhabitants?

Thanks

 

[pa1ntbru5h]

Your camera will always capture more blue than we perceive it as.
Turn up your whites on the radions and/or set your white balance on your camera.
You could also use an orange gel filter to filter out the intense blue

 

[smokin'reefer]

I struggled with this also. I talked to a vendor that uses radions, and he said he does his pics under the 20k setting. He is at Blue Seas Aquariums if you want to check out his website. They are a sponsor here.
I've been playing around with mine and seem to find this the best for most corals. White and royal seems to come out well also. You just have to play around and find your sweet spot.
I'm still looking for mine.
Hope this gives you a place to start anyway.

 

[grassy_noel]

I'm relatively new to the hobby and have been challenged by this as well. That said, I have a lot of experience with photography, so I thought I'd offer a couple insights:

The white balance in your camera and the "color temperature" of the Radion can be set in degrees Kelvin (this is the spectrum of light an iron filament emits when heated to the indicated temperature). That's not super important, except to say that if you want your photos to be correctly white-balanced, the Kelvin setting in your camera should match the Kelvin setting of your lights. That said, I'm not necessarily saying that you want your coral photos to look correctly white-balanced. It seems we're all so conditioned to the blue hues of reef tanks now that a perfectly white balanced photo of a reef tank appears too white (or almost yellow-ish) in my opinion. As folks here have said, you'll want to play around with the color temperature of your lights and your camera until you get something that looks right to you, and this likely will mean that the Kelvin settings of the light and the white-balance of the camera are not necessarily equal.

Of course, this all assumes you have a camera that allows you to manually set white balance. If you do not, I highly recommend an orange filter, like the AquariClip (for phones), which will shift the blue light of the tank into a range that your phone/camera can handle with its automatic settings.

Finally, I think it's important to note that the blue/violet/ultraviolet spectrum of light is what makes your corals fluoresce. It would be simple to say that you should just set your lights and camera to 5,000 Kelvin (daylight) and shoot away. But you'll quickly notice that your corals look sort of brown, not unlike how your tank looks when the lights are off and you see everything under just the ambient light of the room. So, it's fairly important that you keep your lights somewhat blue (at least 10,000K, and probably closer to 20,000K) to get the coral colors to fluoresce, and then to compensate in your camera either by manually setting the white balance or using an orange (or sometimes pink/brown) filter.

Hope this is helpful.