Monterey Bay Aquarium
These pictures leave me feeling conflicted. On the one hand I am incredibly pleased with the results; the photos are rich and dynamic, easily passing the postage stamp test and drawing the viewer in for a closer look.
On the other hand, they remind me quite a bit of studio photographs which I am not a fan of. The photographs are well lit with pleasing backgrounds, however this look was entirely engineered by the aquarium staff.
However, when viewing the photos I am reminded of the painful process I had to go through to capture these in such a poorly lit room, through dirty glass and often of moving subjects that would not sit still long enough for my already tired Fuji X100 to focus on in macro mode!
Given the studio lighting situation, my plan for shooting was fairly simple: Underexpose to reduce exposure of the background and floaters in the tank, shoot on macro to get a unique perspective on perhaps over photographed subject, and shoot as wide an aperture as possible while keeping the subject in the focus region. The wide aperture was almost a given though, as the lighting was very poor in the aquarium to the point of having to increase the ISO so as not to underexpose the shot too much.
The real challenge came in the way of capturing the subject before it left the extremely narrow focusing region. As a general practice, I try to wait a moment after the camera finishes focusing to evaluate the composition of the shot. However due to the macro mode, the wide aperture and perhaps the grumbling parents who were upset that I was typically blocking an entire aquarium I found myself firing off the shot as soon as the Fuji X100 had shown that it had focused on SOMETHING in the frame.
The obvious result result was a mountain of photographs to wade through when I made it home, though I feel the few winning shots that came out of the process were more than worth the hassle. Check out the rest of the photographs in the gallery linked below.
