Because either I’m a glutton for punishment or I love a challenge, less than a year after facing all the difficulties in photographing at Weymouth Aquarium, we visited Brighton Aquarium for more of the same.
I’ve covered it before, but photographing in aquariums is a big challenge. There’s not a lot of light, and you’re shooting through glass or Perspex whose main purpose is to keep the water on the correct side, not offering pristine optical quality. Sometimes the glass is even deliberately designed to bend or distort the light. And you’re shooting things in water, which is a bit of a funny medium when it comes to the speed and diffraction of light. So you end up shooting in high ISOs, low shutter speeds, and ending up with grainy, poor-quality images regardless.
For context, this was in early 2022, so I was still shooting with my Canon EOS 60D and 24-105mm f/4 L lens.
So with all that in mind, let’s go.
Brighton Aquarium is the oldest operating aquarium in the world, having opened in Victorian times. You don’t have to get far into the building for this to become apparent.
Right by this grand entrance were a few small tanks. One of them contained a lobster, who was clearly not feeling particularly sociable that day.
In the other was a little octopus, minding its own business.
As with most of the other aquariums I’ve visited, there was also a water-adjacent section. Apparently the humidity of the rainforest is enough to qualify for inclusion in an aquarium. Not that I’m complaining. Here is a dragon.
This particular aquarium had a section on ants. They had a colony of ants, and had connected it by some long ropes to a place where there was food, basically encouraging them to walk along the rope carrying bits of leaves. It made for a cool visual.
There was also a turtle or terrapin section (I’m not qualified to know the difference – and it’s possible there were both here anyway). It was a nicely set up spot where you could see them underwater and chilling on the waterside.
Eventually we found ourselves near some tanks that had some fish in them (I say this from piecing together the day from these photos, so of course it’s possible that we saw lots of fish before this point, and I just didn’t get any decent photos of them). This tank had an aerator apparently disguised as a rock.
The tanks were nicely decorated. This one had a diver’s helmet in it which looked quite nice.
Some of the smaller tanks, despite my pessimistic introduction at the start, were actually well lit. However, this was back when I was manually setting my ISO, so of course I forgot to adapt my ISO settings accordingly, resulting in an unnecessarily high shutter speed.
Like many aquariums, Brighton has some clown fish in it. I’m not sure if that’s a response by them to the movie Finding Nemo, or if they just got a lot of donations from people who bought their own clown fish in the wake of that film and then realised they didn’t actually want to look after any fish. Next they’ll not want to cook dinner with the chef being controlled by a rat.
There is a section of this aquarium where some of the water processing machinery is visible. This is just the sort of thing I love to photograph, so I did.
I’m pleased that shot came out as sharp as it did, as I clearly did not adjust my ISO for the conditions, and ended up with a pretty slow shutter speed of a third of a second.
As I mentioned at the end of the post from Weymouth Aquarium, lots of the Sea Life aquariums I’ve been to have a jellyfish tank near the end of the tour, illuminated by colour-changing LEDs. These make for nice pictures, because the light is decent, and with the black background you end up with strong contrasting colours. That is also how this tour ended, and thus, it will also be how this post wraps up.
The next two images were a tiny bit noisy, and I selected them to test Lightroom’s AI noise removal feature. It works pretty nicely on these types of images.
I’m pretty pleased with these images. By and large they are better than the ones from my previous aquarium trips. Hopefully that is a sign of me getting better at shooting. Of course, those photos are all from different aquariums, so some of that might be the conditions being more favourable. Let’s assume it’s me getting better, as generally I think I’m taking better pictures overall – this website contains over thirteen years of evidence of that being the case.
Creative Splurges 