Fishy Pictures

[nhmom]

My question is answered. I love Monterey. Usually go in August during the car races with my brother. Although, I spend my time on the pier, etc.

Having attempted these very same photos in the same place you did fantastic. The only ones I had somewhat come out were the jellyfish, but yours are great.

Have a great time in one of my favorite places.

Patty

[Wingman]

Beautiful images...impossible to tell that these were shot behind glass in an aquarium. The last one of the Jelly Fish shows exquisite detail and great color. What 50mm lens did you use? I've had limited success in an aquarium setting in using a 50mm since the angle of view is a bit narrow. Also I noticed you shot at ISO 1600..how much of PP was required?

Jay

[mtngal]

Thanks for the compliments, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who loves this aquarium - it is such a wonderful place to visit. We've been there a couple of times and always love to go back.

I was using the DA*50-135 - I forgot to put the 50mm 1.7 in the bag. At one point I tried my 105 macro lens to get some really small jelly fish, but that didn't work either - its a fast 2.5 but had such a small DOF, or I got camera shake etc. so I stuck with the 50-135. I don't have a really fast wide-angle and didn't think f4 would work.

I was using the extended dynamic range and auto ISO (set from 200 - 1600). I think the extended dynamic range was a mistake, I wish I could go back without it on and compare if they would have less noise (not sure I would). I ended up using Lightroom for some basic levels adjustment and cropping in a couple of cases. Both the silhouette picture and all the jellyfish had a purple look to them on this laptop monitor, and Neat Image kept saying there was clipping in the blue areas so couldn't find a spot to analyze. I ended up using Lightroom to lower the saturation of the purples and magentas (the common noise colors, too) some, and that allowed Neat Image to profile. Then I resized them down in a couple of steps, applying the noise reduction,a bit of smart sharpen/USM combination before the final resize (thank you Scott for those processing tips!). The K20's large files do take some extra work to resize to avoid either oversharpening them or losing all that detail it's capable of capturing.

[mtngal]

One more. I took this one at ISO 3200 because I wasn't having much luck with this particular tank shooting ISO 1600. At first I didn't think much of it, but I did a little curves adjustment in Lightroom, then ran the exported file through Neat Image and resized it. It looks reasonable resized down for here, OK at resized to 1280 across (my monitor resolution at work, for my screensaver) but still looks rougher than I like when viewed full sized. It does show that 3200 can be useable on occasion.

[Rodney9]

Fantastic shots, I always find it very hard to get just a fair shot of my fish in their aquarium, so well done. They are all wonderful.