Getting Creative at Home With Cheap and Cheerful Macro Photography and Your Wife's Fish Tank

If you take a landscape photographer and lock them inside their home for two weeks, strange things will happen. In this amusing video, landscape photographer Thomas Heaton plumbs his creativity to see what happens when you borrow your wife's fish tank.

In a previous video, Heaton showed how you can start shooting macro photography for very little money: you simply have to splash out on a pack of extension tubes, and you'll suddenly unveil a new, tiny universe of possibilities, which you can then refine with the help of a tutorial. Having tackled feathers and flowers, Heaton has since moved onto slightly damper subjects and has clearly been rifling through his cupboards to find interesting substances to drop into water.

Of course, not all of us have a partner who has a "spare" 10-gallon fish tank that was left lying around for us to abuse. However, the rest of the materials put to good use in this video should be relatively easy to source. In addition, B&H Photo has a huge range of LED light panels available, and the pocket-sized, variable color lights from Aputure (check out the Amaran AL-MX and the MC RGBWW) have been receiving very positive reviews. Being able to throw different colors onto whatever random stuff you're dropping into your fish tank would definitely add to the fun.

What other macro photography experiments could you create during lockdown? Leave your ideas in the comments below.

Andy Day's picture

Andy Day is a British photographer and writer living in France. He began photographing parkour in 2003 and has been doing weird things in the city and elsewhere ever since. He's addicted to climbing and owns a fairly useless dog. He has an MA in Sociology & Photography which often makes him ponder what all of this really means.

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2 Comments

After The Great Pandemic is over and you want to get a fish tank for free try this. On the day before garbage day drive around and see what people have thrown out. I am always amazed at how many fish tanks I see on the curb.

Your "wife's" fish tank? Good God, it's the 21st century. My wife,husband, partner, that's fine if a writer is talking about him or herself, but for God's sake, this is the 21st century.