Hi AMFisHers! I love taking pictures in general and apply some of the simple things I have learned through taking those pictures and applied them to when I take fishing pictures as well.
Many of us are sooooooooo excited to have caught a fish that we tend to grab our phones or camera’s right away snap the shot the way it looks and get back to fishing. What happens next has affected all of us we end up with a bad picture of a good fish we caught, which is why I am writing this post to share a few tips with all of you!
First when handling the fish make sure you wet your hands or put gloves on that have also been dipped into the lake, WHY well fish have that ever so popular slime as we all call it all over them, this is a protective layer to the fish and if enough of it is removed it can really do some harm as fish are susceptible to infections.
Have your camera/phone ready somewhere near you so in that excited moment you are not scrambling around for it. This is critical especially if it is a fish of a lifetime and you can’t find your camera.
Always keep the fish in your net or livewell while getting ready for the picture, not on the bottom of the boat or out of water for several minutes, as fish can only hold their breath out of water for about 15 to 20 seconds, possibly a little longer but there is not point if you can have it securely submerged in the net while you get ready. What happens is we see things as being a few seconds while we are rushing around but in the end it turns out to be more like several minutes, which can really stress the fish out or worst case scenario kill it.
If someone else is taking the picture for you make sure they have the sun to their back which would result in you having the sun on your face, this will provide all the light you need to capture a great image without any of those splatter light patches, those usually happen when the person having his/her picture taken is standing with their back to the sun and the camera is directed right into the sun, trust me it makes for a pretty bad picture that way.
Hold the fish horizontally as fish are designed that way to swim around, by holding it vertical you cause a great deal of stress on it’s internal organs that will hang the wrong way. If you do hold the fish vertical as I have in some of my pictures I make sure you take a quite picture then immediately hold it horizontal again.
Try and capture a little of the scenery in the shot, always makes for a better picture when you see some great clouds in the sky, a nice cliff, fall leaves, a cottage, anything structure related enhances that same old picture of you just holding a fish in open water.
These are just a few things I follow that I wanted to share with all of you, WHY well I have about 1477 fishing pictures over the years, many of which are not the greatest pictures BUT an entire fleet of them that I truly love looking at!
Hope you found this post helpful!
The AMFisH guy…