Photographing small fish schools

[Cerianthus]

I recently did a 1,5 dive in a fresh water patch near home.

I did see some small fish schools, but didnt really have any luck. I used a 60mm macro on a canon 20D. I had a hard time focussing. I tried using a focus light, but even the light of a mini C lite scared them. Also the perch were very scared.......

Most of them turned out like this, if I was able to get focus at all


the better one, with a rather distracting background, was this one





Other animals behaved better, but they had to guard their eggs I suppose





Gerard





Forgot to ask the question: what techniques are others using to get small schools: maybe use preset focus ?

[Cerianthus]

Bump !

Anybody have a clue ??

[DDT uk]

I certainly wouldn't claim to be an authority whatsever but it would seem that the thing to do it similar to that when shooting birds in flight. That is, select an aperature to give the maximuim depth of field, prefocus at the point that where you think they are most likely to be, and then try to avoid anything in the background.

The DoF with a 60 or 105 macro is negligible at close range though and so, prefocusing even at f22-32 will always produce only a small percentage of decent shots.