The development of L159 fry

[MarlonnekeW]

A while ago I started a photography project about the development of animals in the first few weeks of their lives. At a certain point, I was getting really frustrated by being so dependent on other people, that I started looking for animals that I could breed myself. That's how I got my first aquarium.
A few weeks ago, this finally paid off and I was able to photograph my first fry; Ancistrus L159.

This resulted in this serie of pictures:


It shows the development of L159 from the day it hatched to the age of 5 weeks old. I took the pictures with a fixed interval (5 days) and paid a lot of attention to proportion, so you can also see how much it has grown in this period.

I'm hoping to do a lot more of these, but unfortunately I only have a small number of tanks and different species. If anyone in The Netherlands can help me with other species, please sent me a message.

[flatfish]

Great photos. Nice work

[Jools]

These are really very nice. If you'd like the series added to the cate-log, drop me an email and I will do that.

Jools

[Jobro]

Great pictures and cool fish. Do you mind sharing how you got those good shots? Did you have a special "photo tank" or the likes?

[MarlonnekeW]

Thanks everyone!!

I did use a special photo tank. The first animal I photographed for my series was a black dog/puppy, so I decided to use a white (studio) background. The consequence was that I had to use the same background and lighting for the fish photo's as well, to make it a consistent series. I tried to build a small 'under water studio' with a backdrop, similar to the setting I used for all the other animals. It took me quite some time to figure out how to do that without for example visible seams or the material showing on the pictures (at first I used a Styrofoam plate at the bottom of the photo tank to get a white bottom surface, but the structure of the Styrofoam was visible, so that was not the right way to go etc.).
Of course I did some editing in Photoshop, but the white background is real and not the result of isolating the fish in photoshop.