Well mateys, if you DIDNT know yet, I be a pisces... a fish woman... a merrrrrmaid! Just to prove that I love the fishes, I am going to share this with you. I have 2 aquariums and a beta fish bowl in my house ( I secretly wish I had a Wall sized salt water tank, but thats for the rich folks). Yea and I live in a beach town, where I finally feel at ease after all my years inland. A bonus outing for me happened last night. A coworker and I went to an aquarium for "Photographers Night". They close the aquarium to the public, and allow only photographers in.
A Nikon Seminar an hour before hand was most helpful. The speaker showed images he had taken the week he was here before hand, with very little touch up. Nikon was there with set ups and "help sessions at various locations in the Aquarium. They also had a stock of "loaner" cameras and lenses. My "loan" of a Nikon D300 (VERY expensive, omg) and a short portrait lens was AWESOME! I can't even tell you what a difference it makes to have a camera with all the right "stuff". I know that I am not the worlds greatest mathematician and believe me taking a GOOD picture is a math equation. Exposure, ISO, available light, bend of the light on the sensor, autofocus, manual focus, aperture settings, etc. It would be nice to just point and shoot, but they can't capture the richness quite as well. Praises to the digital camera age.
After 3 hours, I took close to 500 images and could have gone around once more with the "knowledge" gained from the previous hours experience. Although, I didn't do as well as I had hoped. Fish don't really stand still. They are kind of skittish, and usually you capture a fish butt by the time the shutter clicks. As expected, water has a huge amount of blue, including blue walls inside the tanks, so you are constantly dealing with White Balance. But if you stand still and no one pushes you out of the way, sweet fish eyes are in your focus and you can get the awesomeness of the underwater world (behind plexi-glass of course,, which is a whole different set of issues). Man, what I learned last night is valuable though. Well worth the weary body this morning.
Time to get serious and upgrade my D40 to something with a higher ISO range, and more options in focusing. I LOVED having 3200 ISO in a dark place. I will search for a noise reduction software. And I am going to start taking more and more pictures. Maybe some day I can do some paintings from them. That is my dream.
Happy Monday everyone! Enjoy the Jellies (they are straight out of the camera, so please forgive the noise). The only mermaids were in the ocean to the left of the museum... ;-)~
