Sleeper Dragon Goby

Image Critiques
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Original - BarredDragonGoby.jpg
Original - BarredDragonGoby.jpg2000Ă—1600 1.01 MB

Critique Style: Standard

The photographer is looking for thoughtful feedback on the image as a whole, especially around the areas noted below.

Feedback Focus: Artistic / Expressive

About This Image

Retirement has provided me with some extra time for taking care of my small reef tank and managed to give the glass a thorough scraping and cleaning. This is a sleeper dragon goby that feeds on mats of cyanobacteria, filamentous algae, and small organisms that live in the bottom substrate. Photographing subjects in an aquarium poses some interesting challenges. My reef tank is illuminated with several powerful LED fixtures that provide a fairly wide spectrum with a heavy blue-purple blue bias. Digital cameras tend to biase the white balance to produce very blue images. I used a single off camera flash set at -0.3ev mounted so that the light emitted by the flash would strike the aquarium glass at a 45 degree angle. This eliminates any backscatter from the flash while lighting up the subject perfectly. The flash also reveals the beautiful coloration of the goby and the granular texture of the unscaled areas of the head. I also selected for a white area in the image to reset the white balance to a more warm temperature for less blue in the comp.

Feedback Requested

Getting the lighting under control was a major task. How did I do? I left some of the blue along the top of the subject to help separate the subject from the BG. I also left the pupil of the eye as is because the opalescent nature of the fish’s eye is normal for this type of fish.

Technical Details

Camera: Z9
Lens: 105mm f2.8 Micro
Focal length: 105mm
Shutter speed: 1/200sec
Aperture: f11
ISO: 800
Flash: -0.3ev

Tripod/handheld: Handheld
Focus method: auto
Filters:
Technique: camera focal plane held parallel to aquarium glass to eliminate blurriness at edges
Conditions: Captive Animal

Processing software: Adobe Lightroom Classic Photoshop CS 2026
Major adjustments: Exposure, Levels , WB, Clarity, Rotated and cropped frame for horizontal comp
Blending/stacking:
Other notes: Subject mask used for brightening and adding contrast, BG mask used for darkening, Light areas burned to make them less obvious.

1 Like
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Jim, quite the photo! The details and colors are amazing. Having done a bit of photography in an aquarium and through the water in my pond, I understand the challenges and the need for the camera to be parallel to the surface. I find your comments about digital camera and their color interpretation very interesting…something I’ve wondered about in my own processing but found it challenging to adjust.

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Jim: You’re making the most of your retirement. I like everything about this with the sole tiny exception of the light URC. Seems like an easy fix with a vignette or some careful painting/cloning. Marvelous subject superbly captured. >=))>

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Amazingly high image quality, Jim. Having to go through all that glass and lighting adjustment and to still obtain such a beautifully lit and sharp image is amazing. I could see doing something about that upper right corner, though I didn’t really notice it until @Bill_Fach mentioned it.

1 Like
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Quite the process getting to this beautifully crafted image - colors certainly vibrant and not over done. Just a Q - have the whole fish ?

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Thank you @Mark_Seaver , @Dennis_Plank , @Bill_Fach , and @Karl_Zuzarte for your comments and critiques. @Karl_Zuzarte I’ll need to take another picture showing the entire fish. I do know where it lives :wink: . There’s so much coral in the tank that it just takes time to catch the fish out in the open. …Jim

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HI Jim, terrific capture. Details and colors look really fine. I’ve never shot in an aquarium setting but I can appreciate the challenges. Well done.