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.
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