A Trip to the Aquarium

Sea anemone.

Sea anemone.

Jellyfish.

Jellyfish.

Jellyfish.

Jellyfish.

Belugas in the beluga habitat.

This would make a perfect LOLCat - "I call this press conference... to discuss mah bukket!!!"

Sealion catching a fish... you can see it just pre-mouth stage here.

The fantastic statue outside the front enterance.

Flowers outside the enterance

Photography inside the aquarium is hard! I tried a technique I read about using a plastic hood to put the lens against the glass to eliminate glare. That worked well, except that the light was so low that I couldn't focus well (the hood only fit my manual lenses). Otherwise I had to punch the ISO up to 1600 to get any sort of a decent shot, and when my camera wasn't hunting for focus (a flaw in the *ist-D is it hunts a lot in low light), it got some decent shots, but there were a lot of underexposed fish-blurs in the batch as well :) Definitely something I'd like to throw the K10-D at with it's in-body shake reduction. I also really have to learn to re-set my settings when I go outdoors.... a lot of my shots outside the front entrance were taken at ISO 800 because I had forgotten to change it back.

By the way, the colors in the jellyfish shots weren't pumped up or saturated... they came out of the camera that way, as the new (?) jellyfish exhibit is designed to give maximum impact. I just wish it was brighter so I could have gotten better shots. Sadly at 100% they are fairly grainy/blotchy :( My intention though was to get the vivid colors that I was seeing, and I hope you'll agree I did a decent job of that.