Photographing your Koi

Most hobbyists will take pictures of your Koi from time to time. This is to keep a record of their growth and pattern changes over time. Others will do it to share the beauty of your pets with friends. These are normally taken with the Koi in the pond. Sometimes, you may take the pictures of them in a plastic, blue bowl. These pictures are normally of a single fish and are called "blue bowl" photographs. Commercial fish breeders/traders often do this to show the fish to prospective buyers or to sell their fish over the internet.

Photographing Koi is challenging. One of the challenges to getting a good and clear photo is the glare and reflection of the sky off the water surface. Unless you catch and place your subject in a bowl, it will seldom keep still in the pond. The following are some tips for taking good pictures:

- If you are using a camera that allows you to fit a filter to your lens, a polarising filter is recommended. The polarising filter comes with 2 pieces of glass, one fixed and one movable. Once you have decided on your camera angle to take your picture, you need to adjust the movable piece to remove the glare from the water surface. The polarising filter will make the picture slightly darker, so you may need to compensate by overexposing your shot by one or two f-stop. If your camera comes with Through-the-lens exposure metering, then you probably would not need to worry about this.

- With or without a polarising filter, if is best to choose a camera angle that avoid such reflections of the sky. Since the filter may not be able to remove all the reflection, choose a cloudy day with an overcast sky if you can. Bring the bowl indoors if you are taking a "blue bowl" photograph.

- Koi are constantly moving and are fast swimmers, especially when they are in a feeding frenzy in the pond. Set your shutter speed to be as high as you could. Slow shutter speed results in a blurred picture of the subject. Use fast film (or fast film setting in your digital camera) if needed but the trade off is grainy picture. Otherwise, use a flash but beware of the flash light bouncing off the water surface. The time between pressing the release button and actual taking of the photograph could be a problem as well. Use a camera with low shutter delay speed. 

- It is best to photograph the Koi against a black or dark background. Your Koi will stand out nicely in the picture. My ponds are coated with black epoxy paint for the same reason.

If you are taking the picture of your Koi from above, against a dark background, you may have to underexpose by up to 3 f-stops to compensate. Use center-weighted or spot-metering.

- Take your pictures from multiple angles. Experiment with the composition, especially if you have a nice pond and garden.

- It is good to include some other foreground or background objects to give some sense of scale to your pictures. If taking a picture of your Koi in a bowl, you may want to place a scale rule into the bowl to document its growth.

- Just like photographing a human face, I would choose to focus on the eyes to get a sharper picture. That is, if the Koi is in a bowl and relatively still.

- It is best to take multiple shots. A digital camera with instant playback is useful to check if you got the ideal picture. A good picture of a Koi is one when its pectoral fins are shown extended out from its body.

Pond Location – My Third Pond

I have the opportunity to built my current and third Koi pond when I sold my corner terrace house and bought a 10-year old detached house in early 2007. I bought the house with the intention to extend the building structure to create additional bedrooms and living space for my family and of course, a new Koi pond!

The plot of land for the house is a longish, rectangular shape, 10m x 50m in size. I have appreciated the benefits of locating the koi pond close to the living areas of the house from my second pond. Hence this is a key consideration in the design of the layout  for the new building and location and shape for my new Koi pond.

We decided to locate the new pond next to my dining room and have it integrated into the building structure. This means the pond design has to be practically rectangular or squarish in shape, i.e. a formal pond.

 

The dining room is designed with glass folding doors on one side and glass sliding doors on another side which can be opened to bring the “outdoors” into the house. A water feature is constructed next to the dining room. It serves as a water return from the filter. Water from the return pump located in the filter comes out of a venturi pipe and also a large brown pot. Water coming out the pot signifies “overflowing abundance” which is a good feng-shui feature. It also provides the soothing sound of trickling water. For the koi, it provides the needed aeration.

A wooden bridge is laid over the pond to link the Dining room to a new “Entertainment room” on the other side of the pond. The pond circles around the Entertainment room. This creates the illusion that the Entertainment room is “floating” on the pond or some may say sunken into the pond.

 

My water garden is at the back of the house, and can be viewed from the Entertainment room. It houses some small Koi and water lilies. This part of the pond (water garden) is physically separated from the main Koi pond, although they share the same biological filter. Large Koi eats water lily and will tends to dig at the soil and muddied the water!