How To Take Stunning Images of Your Aquarium

Aquarium photography is harder than it looks. Water distorts light, glass creates reflections, fish refuse to hold still, and tank lighting rarely cooperates with camera sensors. These challenges frustrate even experienced photographers.

The good news: you don’t need expensive gear to get great aquarium photos. Whether you’re working with a smartphone, a compact point-and-shoot camera, or a DSLR, the techniques below will help you capture images worth sharing. It comes down to understanding a few fundamentals and being patient with your subjects.

Understanding the Exposure Triangle

Every camera — from a smartphone to a professional DSLR — uses three settings to control how much light reaches the sensor. Together, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO form the “exposure triangle.” Understanding how these three elements interact gives you control over your aquarium photos instead of leaving everything to automatic mode.

Aperture (f-stop)

Aperture controls the size of the lens opening when you take a photo. A lower f-stop number (like f/2.8) means a wider opening that lets in more light and creates a blurred background, isolating your fish as the focal point. A higher f-stop number (like f/11) narrows the opening, keeping the entire aquarium in sharp focus from front to back.

For aquarium photography, aperture controls a creative choice: do you want a single fish in sharp focus against a dreamy blurred background, or the entire tank in focus? Lower f-stop numbers work best for individual fish portraits, while higher f-stop numbers suit full-tank shots.

Shutter Speed

Shutter speed determines how long the camera sensor is exposed to light. Fast shutter speeds (1/125 second or faster) freeze fish mid-swim, producing sharp images. Slow shutter speeds let in more light but risk motion blur from moving fish and camera shake from your hands.

Aquarium photography almost always demands fast shutter speeds because fish are constantly moving. When lighting is dim — as it often is in aquariums — the camera in automatic mode will slow the shutter speed down, producing blurry images. A tripod helps with camera shake but won’t fix motion blur from the fish themselves.

ISO

ISO measures the camera sensor’s sensitivity to light. Higher ISO values (like ISO 800 or 1600) make the sensor more sensitive, which helps in dim aquarium lighting, but also introduce grain (digital noise) into the image. Lower ISO values (like ISO 100 or 200) produce cleaner images but require more available light.

In aquarium photography, you’ll often need to raise the ISO higher than you’d like. The trade-off between a slightly grainy but sharp photo versus a clean but blurry one almost always favors the grainy option — you can reduce noise in editing software, but you can’t fix motion blur.

Camera Equipment for Aquarium Photography

You can take good aquarium photos with whatever camera you already own. A DSLR with interchangeable lenses and full manual control will give you the most flexibility, but smartphones and compact cameras are capable of impressive results when used correctly.

Smartphone Cameras

Smartphone aquarium photography has become surprisingly capable. Modern phones carry high-resolution cameras with sophisticated automatic processing that rivals dedicated point-and-shoot cameras in image quality, especially in well-lit conditions.

Smartphone cameras continue to improve rapidly. The latest models from Apple, Samsung, and Google include night mode features that perform well in the low-light conditions typical of aquarium photography.

Point-and-Shoot Cameras

Compact point-and-shoot cameras offer a step up from smartphones with larger sensors, optical zoom, and dedicated image processors. These cameras evaluate the scene automatically and adjust settings to produce the best possible exposure.

Point-and-shoot cameras are the most popular choice for casual aquarium photographers. They’re portable, user-friendly, and many models include manual adjustments for aperture and shutter speed when you want more creative control.

DSLR Cameras

DSLR (Digital Single-Lens Reflex) cameras offer full manual control over every exposure setting, interchangeable lenses, and larger sensors that perform better in low light. The learning curve is steeper than with a smartphone or point-and-shoot, but the image quality potential is significantly higher.

For aquarium photography with a DSLR, a macro lens is the single best investment. Macro lenses let you capture fine details — individual scales, coral textures, shrimp antennae — that wider lenses simply cannot resolve. A 60mm or 100mm macro lens works well for most aquarium setups.

Color Correction for Aquarium Lighting

Gels

Color-correction gels are translucent filters that attach to your lens, clip onto your phone camera, or slide in front of your compact camera’s lens. Gels adjust the color temperature of incoming light to produce more accurate colors in your photos.

Aquarium Photography Apps

Aquarium photography apps designed for reef tanks solve a common color problem: blue LED lighting that makes corals fluoresce beautifully to the human eye overwhelms camera sensors, producing washed-out photos that look nothing like the tank in person.

These specialized apps correct the color imbalance in real time, filtering out excess blue and revealing the true colors of corals, fish, and invertebrates. Reef aquarists who want to share accurate images of coral coloration on social media will find these apps far more effective than manual white balance adjustment.

Critical Factors for Aquarium Photography

Lighting Is Everything

Light is the single most important factor in aquarium photography. No amount of expensive equipment compensates for inadequate or poorly managed lighting. Even a smartphone produces excellent photos when the lighting is right.

Aquarium LED lights provide the primary light source for most fish tank photography. Natural light can supplement tank lighting if your aquarium sits near a window. Constant artificial light (like a desk lamp) works better than flash for filling in shadows.

The biggest lighting challenge in aquarium photography is glass reflections. Room lights, windows, and your own reflection all bounce off the tank glass and appear in your photos.

Capturing Moving Fish

Capturing moving fish requires fast shutter speeds and familiarity with your fish’s behavior. Learning where specific fish tend to hover, their typical swimming routes, and when they pause gives you the ability to anticipate shots instead of chasing them.

Set the shutter speed to at least 1/125 second to freeze fish movement. If your camera’s automatic mode produces blurry fish photos, switch to manual mode and increase the shutter speed. To compensate for the reduced light from a faster shutter, raise the ISO and widen the aperture (lower the f-stop number).

Depth of Field

Depth of field in aquarium photography is a creative choice that dramatically changes the mood of your photos. A shallow depth of field (low f-stop like f/2.8) blurs everything behind your subject, making a single fish pop against a soft, dreamy background. A deep depth of field (high f-stop like f/11) keeps the entire aquarium in sharp focus from front glass to back wall.

Shallow depth of field works best for portraits of individual fish. Deep depth of field is better for full-tank shots where you want to showcase your aquascape, plants, and all inhabitants together.

Glass Distortion

Glass distortion is the most frustrating technical challenge in aquarium photography, especially with bow-front or curved tanks. Light bends as it passes through glass at an angle, warping shapes and softening details in your photos.

Flash: Use It Carefully or Not at All

On-camera flash fired directly at an aquarium creates a bright white reflection on the glass that ruins the photo. This reflection is nearly impossible to avoid when the flash sits directly above or beside the lens.

DSLR cameras with off-camera flash capabilities offer a workaround: position the external flash above the tank pointing downward. This mimics natural overhead lighting and avoids glass reflections entirely. However, some aquarists avoid flash altogether because sudden bright light may stress sensitive fish species.

Tripod Use

A tripod eliminates camera shake, which is useful when shooting with slower shutter speeds in dim aquarium lighting. However, since aquarium photography typically requires fast shutter speeds to freeze fish movement, a tripod matters less than in other types of photography.

A tripod becomes more valuable for full-tank shots where you’re using a high f-stop (small aperture) and need a slower shutter speed to compensate. It’s also useful for time-lapse photography of your aquarium or for shooting video.

Post-Processing Your Aquarium Photos

Photo Editing Software

Raw aquarium photos almost always benefit from editing. Even minor adjustments to exposure, white balance, and sharpness can transform a decent shot into an impressive one.

Professional photographers rely on Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom for editing. These are paid subscription software that offer powerful tools but require time to learn. For casual aquarium photography, free alternatives like GIMP, Snapseed (mobile), or the built-in editors on your phone or computer handle the most common adjustments.

Most photo editing software offers free trial periods (usually 30 days). YouTube tutorials for programs like Lightroom and Snapseed can get you up to speed quickly on the specific adjustments that matter most for aquarium photography.

Preparing for an Aquarium Photo Shoot

A little preparation before you start shooting makes a significant difference in photo quality. These steps take about 30 minutes but dramatically improve your results.

Getting Better Results

Practice and Patience

Aquarium photography rewards patience more than any other skill. Fish eventually settle into predictable patterns, and the more time you spend observing your tank, the better you’ll anticipate those perfect moments. Take many more photos than you think you need — digital storage is cheap, and you can delete the misses later.

Experiment with different camera settings, angles, and compositions. Try shooting the same fish from above, from the side, and at a slight upward angle. Each perspective reveals different colors and details that you might miss from your usual viewing position.

Get Close

Close-up aquarium photography produces the most compelling images. Getting your lens within inches of the glass reveals details invisible to the casual observer — the iridescent shimmer on a betta’s scales, the delicate structure of a coral polyp, or the tiny eyes of a cherry shrimp.

Macro lenses excel at this type of close-up aquarium photography, but even a smartphone pressed gently against the glass (to block reflections) can capture surprising detail. Experiment with different distances to find what works best with your equipment.

Conclusion

Aquarium photography takes practice, but the results are worth the effort. The techniques covered here — understanding your camera’s exposure settings, managing aquarium lighting and reflections, preparing your tank before shooting, and editing your photos afterward — apply whether you’re using a smartphone or a professional DSLR.

Start with the fundamentals: clean your glass, turn off the room lights, and be patient with your fish. As you practice, you’ll develop an eye for composition and timing that no amount of expensive equipment can replace. The best aquarium camera is the one you have with you — what matters is knowing how to use it.