Back in February we took another trip to the Brighton Aquarium. Our last trip there was back in April 2022, although we did also visit Weymouth Aquarium a couple of years ago, so there are a few aquarium posts in my back catalogue at this point. Despite that, somehow this post is my first ‘return’ to an aquarium post.
Brighton Aquarium is one of the oldest in the country, built during Victorian times, and it shows from the moment you walk in.
I should point out I’m still in a bit of a creative mood when it comes to editing photos, so right off the bat I’ve gotten a bit artsy – and am offering a couple of different edits of our opening scene.
With the last few aquarium posts, I pointed out how much of a challenging environment they can be. You’re shooting through dirty plexiglass in really low light conditions so it can be difficult to get decent results. This, however, is my first visit since upgrading to the R6 Mark II, a camera with substantially better low light performance. It performs better at an ISO of 25600 than my old 60D did at ISO 6400, allowing me to get shots like the ones above that would have been near impossible before (and I’m even shooting at f/5, either in order to get more of the fish in focus, or because I forgot to change it from shooting the entranceway).
It is customary in any post I write that involves wildlife to remind you that I’m really quite bad at identifying species, something I attribute to humorous ignorance at this point. I’m sure I could learn, or at the very least use an AI to let me know what it in the shot, but I’m not sure I can be bothered with the former, and the latter feels disingenuous. Anyway I think this is a fish.
These are also fish, albeit smaller ones.
I am not completely ignorant, of course. This is an octopus.
By this point, as you can see, I’d realised I should be opening up the aperture more and was shooting at f/2.8.
As ever, the aquarium is not all aquatic creatures. They have some land dwellers in the tropical section, such as ants and spiders. Of course, this lizard is one of the more impressive specimens.
One of the tanks that distracted me last time was the turtle tank, and it got me again this time out too.
This is one time where I should perhaps have closed up the aperture a bit more, because these little critters were moving around a lot and there were a fair few frames where I missed the focus I was aiming for.
Another staple of any Sea Life aquarium I’ve been to is at least one giant turtle, and Brighton is no exception – and like most other Sea Life centres, it was spending its time in the big tank with a glass tunnel through it.
We moved round to the lower level of the Big Tank. Here they had a diver’s helmet and a button you could press to turn on some bubbles, which made for a nice photo op.
Also in this tank was a variety of other fish. This one in particular looked very unimpressed by everything.
Also in the tank were a few sharks happily swimming about.
After making our way through the tunnel we came to a section of smaller tanks, containing some small and colourful sponges. Or anemones. Or whatever.
We soon came to one of my favourite parts of any Sea Life aquarium, although admittedly it’s also usually at the end of any visit: the jellyfish. Every Sea Life Centre I’ve been to has a tank of jellyfish illuminated by colour-changing LED lights, and they’re one of my favourite things to shoot at an aquarium. And this time, I had my image-stabilised f/2 macro to help me out.
This bunch of jellyfish looked more colourful than usual, and reflected the light in interesting ways, giving them a truly alien look. Well, more than normal.
Somewhere around this point I realised that shooting at f/2 was leading to missed focus and started closing up the aperture a bit.
I like the other jellyfish that’s drifted into the frame above. It adds to the otherworldliness of the shot by looking like the surface to another planet.
I also got one quintessential jellyfish shot – although I think I did flip this image, it’s technically upside down.
But, being as they are at the end of the tour, that does mean that once again I’ve ended up stopping a bit suddenly. But it was good to go back to somewhere familiar with new equipment that could show demonstrable improvements over previous trips.
As always, you can find a slightly fuller selection of images from this trip in the gallery below.
Creative Splurges 