can't get any good shots

[reefgeek]

please help I have a nikon cool pix 8800vr and for over a year now I have tried getting shots of my corals in the daytime and under moonlights but they either come out out of focus or the colour is all wrong, please can anyone tell me what settings I should have on for close up daytime and night time pics.
:(
I am pretty sure that I could get better shots with a £10 camera at the moment, one that takes pics of things as they look not change the colour and blur them up

[Alastair]

Look up "white balance".. there's a thread on it active at the moment.. that will explain the colour differences.

Problems with focus can be a number of things.. most common is being too close (your camera manual will list a minimum focussing distance.. any closer than this and the camera can't focus.. blurring is most often camera shake.. use a tripod to cure this..

Other than the colour difference (white balance settings vary between tanks and different cameras have diferent buttons to press to change it) the basics for tank photography are the same* and have been covered several times.. have a look back for threads with titles along the lines of "I can't get good shots", "My camera can't take decent tank pics", "Help it's all blurry!"..

Oh.. and please post a few example pictures for specific help.. it's very difficult to give individual guidance when there are no examples of what's going wrong...


* use a tripod being the most important piece of advice for FTS and coral shots. And for static shots use the self-timer so you don't have your fingers on the camera when it takes the shot.. this helps control shake even more..

[KROS]

check your iso sensitivity settings too, it might be set on something like 50 or 100 which is fairly low, great for the best image quality in good light but not so great for fast shutter speeds (which might add to your camera blur) so see if you can set that at 400 or so which will allow the camera to use much faster shutter speeds and cut down on your exposure times and therefore your motion blur or hand shake