Yellow Fish

The big yellow fish worries about the slight scaling to his jaw while some of the tiger barbs mill around behind him.

I don't actually know what this fish is — if anyone knows, feel free to inform us in the comments.

Photographing fish like this is surprisingly tricky. For starters, there's almost always a large reflective glass wall between you and the fish, so your flash will do serious damage to the picture. What I've done here is to turn the on-camera flash down as low as it'll go (1/3 power) and use that to trigger a larger flash (Pentax FTZ-500, set to slave mode and 1/4 power) which is working through a diffuser at the top of the fish-tank. You also have to tilt the camera to avoid reflections.

It's tricky, and requires either very careful metering (hah!) or lots of experimentation. I went for experimentation. Set the camera in manual mode, with the shutter speed equal to your flash sync (usually 1/60sec) and adjust the f-stop until the resulting picture is ok. (or adjust the power of the flash, if you don't want to compromise your depth-of-field

One thing I found was that the light falls off very quickly from the top of the fish tank to the bottom. So, the big flash will need to be set at 1/16 or 1/32 power for a top swimming fish, 1/4 or 1/8 for a mid-level fish (like this one) or 1/2 or even full power for a bottom dweller.