Casio Exilim EX-Z50, Auratus, etc.
He is awesome looking, and so are your pictures. May I ask what camera you use?
My pics are horrible with my africans , they never stay still for me!
I have a very blue what I think is an aratus, but after seeing yours I will look at even closer. He is very dominant also in my tank. He has 2 females and then there is a tanner aratus that I am not sure about yet wheather male or female.
Thank you for sharing your fish here . Always welcome to see such a nice fish.
Hello Matt. Thanks for your nice comments.
It may surprise you to know that I have never been a camera person. Many years ago, like over 25 years ago, I owned one of those polaroid cameras that shoots the photo out of a slot, and then you watch it develop before your very eyes. But other than that, I've never owned a camera.
However, a while back, maybe two years ago, I purchased a Casio Exilim EX-Z50 digital camera for my daughter, knowing very little about digital cameras. I even got a 1 GB memory card for it.
Well, it sat on my daughter's desk for the longest time, getting very little real use. Then, just a few days ago, after having had my fish for two months, I decided to try my hand at digital photography. There are so many settings on that camera that it is downright confusing; so, I just started out at the default settings, and to say the least, my pics were less than satisfactory.
Then I discovered that in addition to the Reference Guide, there is also a PDF Users Manual. So, determined to take better pics, I began reading through it. I haven't fiddled with all of the settings yet, but just by adjusting the white balance, the image size, the type of zoom, the level of zoom, the picture quality, and the profile style, I have managed to take much better pics during the past few days, as you have seen.
It's kind of funny, because we both assumed that it was a rather inferior camera, even though I paid about $500 for it, including the extra 1 GB memory card. As it turns out, we, or better said, I, just had to learn how to use it properly.
Speaking of Melanochromis Auratus, when I first got my fish in April of this year, while I was trying to properly identify them, MA was one of the four in my list. In fact, I just now looked again at an image of one in my Malawi Cichlids book, and I am wondering if my females might be a cross between Melanochromis Cyaneorhabdos and Melanochromis Auratus; the reason being that my two females have a thin yellow edge on their dorsal fin, as well as a bit of yellow on the edge of their tails...and the male MA appears to have the same thing. Hmmm...maybe I am on to something.
My males are definitely not MA's though. I am still convinced that they are MC's, or MJ's, or else a hybrid of one of those.
What does everyone else think?
Thanks!
