What would be your advises when taking shoot in an aquarium?
What are your preferred lenses? How do you deal with the low light? What about the aquarium glass which bring some deformation? The fact that fishes are moving and hiding?
A zoo style is what I had in mind but I guess tips for home aquarium are welcome as well.
Cleaning the glass is a great suggestion, however, even with clean glass you have a few more issues.
Fast moving fish - Since fish often make quick movements, you will probably want a fairly fast shutter speed, which means you need fast lenses and plenty of light.
Glare - This can be caused by your flash, or by other ambient lights. Ideally, there would be zero lighting on your side of the glass, with the inside well lit. Since this isn't going to happen, you will need to account for the reflections on the glass.
Clean the glass! And I'm not talking about any camera equipment.
Be careful what you use to clean though, because chemicals/soaps/cleaning fluid are bad for fish.
A tip I haven't seen yet: set your white balance to Tungsten because the auto white balance will not work and everything will have a yellow tint .
If you have the ability to shoot RAW, than do so and correct the white balance later to get the best colors for your shot.
If possible, get the lens right up to the glass. And by right up I mean actually touching it. It should also be square on. That way you lose the reflections on the glass that you might get from any lights behind you. You can also push gently against the glass which will help steady the camera for longer exposures.
As in every low-light situation, fast lenses always help. Aquariums are different in that you're shooting through a glass, which obviously means that on-camera flash is guaranteed to ruing the picture. Apart from that, you might get reflections from other light sources, which you might eliminate by putting the lens directly on the glass (lens hood might also help).
If you're just photographing fish in your aquarium at home, you can get around the light problem by lighting the aquarium from the side.
Try manual focus. I've had issues with autofocus since the camera focused on the glass instead of the subject inside the aquarium.
I can't speak directly to aquariums, however I've done shots at zoo's before. When things are enclosed in glass, you tend to have problems with glare. Especially from flash, but also from other sources, it can make getting a shot very difficult. The one trick I've learned is to find off-angles from any intruding light sources. The general idea is that light bounced strait on will bounce strait back, so if you need to use flash, point it at an angle to the glass so any reflected light bounces off and away from the camera. It can be tricky to position yourself for the best shot, as you need to take the same bounce angle into account for any other light sources.
I also highly recommend using at least an f/2.8 lens, however faster lenses would be even better. A wider max aperture will allow more light through in less time. High ISO performance is probably your best tool, though. A camera that can handle ISO 800/1600 (or better) without too much noise is going to give you the best chance of capturing good shots.
