• Folks, if you've recently upgraded or renewed your annual club membership but it's still not active, please reach out to the BOD or a moderator. The PayPal system has a slight bug which it doesn't allow it to activate the account on it's own.

Lighting gels

mnat

Officer Emeritus
Staff member
Moderator
Since we love to share photos of our fish and corals, it can always be frustrating when we can't get a good picture of something we love. Lighting and cameras can obviously change the look of a coral very quickly and no matter how good you are at photoshop can't bring it back to normal. I have had very good luck shooting most of my fish and corals in my display with the LEDs, unfortunately for me I am terrible in the frag tank which of course has most of my nicest corals. For some reason, I can't get good shots under the T5s.

After joining a few groups on Facebook I saw a guy talking about lighting gels and he was posting amazing pics with just a cellphone, $20 clip on macro and a lighting gel. I reached out to him and ordered them, I figured what's the harm it was $5 shipped for a bunch of the gels. So I finally went down into the basement and shot these photos just with my Iphone and the the gels:

Control photo with no gel:
photo13_zps59219bda.jpg

Gel:
photo24_zps01b35641.jpg


Control photo with no gel:
photo34_zpsd4c96cfe.jpg

Gel:
photo41_zps9554f341.jpg

photo14_zpsbb26190b.jpg

photo25_zps1c82df68.jpg

One extra just because:
photo35_zpsf4c341af.jpg
 
Those are amazing pics with the lighting gel Mike. I struggle taking pics cause I can't get that balance to make my pics look clean enough to post. I think I'll be investing in those lighting gels.
 

mnat

Officer Emeritus
Staff member
Moderator
I think it is the same dude, mark short. My pack had like 8 so not surprised with the price differential.
 

redfishbluefish

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
Wow! I'm impressed. Group buy!!!!


So help me out....do you use the gel in front of the camera or over the T5 lights? And would you use a different gel for, say T5s versus LEDs?
 

mnat

Officer Emeritus
Staff member
Moderator
Wow! I'm impressed. Group buy!!!!


So help me out....do you use the gel in front of the camera or over the T5 lights? And would you use a different gel for, say T5s versus LEDs?

They are small only like an inch or so squared so they are just over the camera lens. There are like8 different color gels so I took pics with all of them and picked the three I liked the best. I would assume under different lighting different gels would work better but I did not try it yet with the LEDs.
 

TanksNStuff

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
Nice Mike! Those things really do work, huh? Do you know if they sell them for DSLR cameras too, like say for a Canon standard 18-55mm lens?
 

mnat

Officer Emeritus
Staff member
Moderator
Nice Mike! Those things really do work, huh? Do you know if they sell them for DSLR cameras too, like say for a Canon standard 18-55mm lens?

George, they are not big enough to cover a whole a DLSR lens. However, you can buy these gels on amazon which are much bigger and will easily fit over the camera. I ordered 2 through amazong so my next move will be to cut one down and see how it looks with my DSLR. The problem with amazon, is they have like a million colors so it is guess work and they are not as cheap (due to size).
 

redfishbluefish

Officer Emeritus
Officer Emeritus
For you SLR's, they sell filters that screw onto your lens. I used these type filters years ago with B&W film work.

stock-photo-set-of-creative-and-conversion-filters-for-slr-camera-884675.jpg
 

hcker99

Sponsor
Gold Sponsor
Based on Mike's recommendation I ordered a set from Mark Short on FB. Here are a couple pics under Ocean Revive LED's (50% blue, 10% white) taken with my Samsung Galaxy S4. Normally these pictures would be saturated in purple due to the UV but the orange filter seems to fix that issue.
 

Attachments

  • 2014-06-04 11.38.43.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.38.43.jpg
    91.6 KB · Views: 42
  • 2014-06-04 11.38.54.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.38.54.jpg
    93.3 KB · Views: 40
  • 2014-06-04 11.39.08.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.39.08.jpg
    100.4 KB · Views: 40
  • 2014-06-04 11.39.23.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.39.23.jpg
    94.1 KB · Views: 42
  • 2014-06-04 11.39.33.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.39.33.jpg
    91.7 KB · Views: 38
  • 2014-06-04 11.40.04.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.40.04.jpg
    92.4 KB · Views: 37
  • 2014-06-04 11.40.17.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.40.17.jpg
    88.6 KB · Views: 38
  • 2014-06-04 11.40.41.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.40.41.jpg
    95.3 KB · Views: 40
  • 2014-06-04 11.40.53.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.40.53.jpg
    93.8 KB · Views: 38
  • 2014-06-04 11.42.16.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.42.16.jpg
    88.4 KB · Views: 38
  • 2014-06-04 11.42.32.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.42.32.jpg
    92.3 KB · Views: 40
  • 2014-06-04 11.42.49.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.42.49.jpg
    96.7 KB · Views: 38
  • 2014-06-04 11.43.06.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.43.06.jpg
    105.7 KB · Views: 40
  • 2014-06-04 11.43.23.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.43.23.jpg
    91.8 KB · Views: 36
  • 2014-06-04 11.43.30.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.43.30.jpg
    95.9 KB · Views: 38
  • 2014-06-04 11.42.56.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.42.56.jpg
    101.5 KB · Views: 37

hcker99

Sponsor
Gold Sponsor
And these are under Ocean Revive LED's (100% blue 0% white). Still very blue (of course :) ) but it now allows other colors to be picked up were as before the pics would be entirely blue.
 

Attachments

  • 2014-06-04 11.41.12.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.41.12.jpg
    94.8 KB · Views: 38
  • 2014-06-04 11.41.24.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.41.24.jpg
    100.6 KB · Views: 43
  • 2014-06-04 11.45.22.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.45.22.jpg
    94.6 KB · Views: 40
  • 2014-06-04 11.45.35.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.45.35.jpg
    88.7 KB · Views: 36
  • 2014-06-04 11.45.46.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.45.46.jpg
    95.7 KB · Views: 34
  • 2014-06-04 11.46.24.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.46.24.jpg
    91.1 KB · Views: 32
  • 2014-06-04 11.46.34.jpg
    2014-06-04 11.46.34.jpg
    93 KB · Views: 31
Back when I had my photography studio, I used to order "gel samples" from the manufacturers and they came in a book like paint/fabric samples. They were the PERFECT size for my flash (1"x2") and free with over 100 colors. That may be a good thing to try :)
 
I wonder if you couldn't bring them to B&H or even contact the manufacturers (Lee, Rosco, etc) and have them matched.

THESE are the swatch books I was talking about - they are the PERFECT size to fit over an external flash - so they will fit over a point & shoot lens and a phone lens - but I don't think they'll fit over a DSLR lens:


Swatchbook
 
Top