Taking Photos at the Aquarium

Recently I visited the Monterrey Aquarium with my girlfriend. It was an awesome trip and I had loads of fun but taking photos in the aquarium is hard. Maybe not hard, but it takes some getting used to and I wish I had better gear to take advantage of the great exhibits. Here's some things I learned...

1) It's dark in there! - And i mean really dark. Here's a shot of some corrals. This was probably one of the brightest exhibits i saw there. To show you how dark it was, here are some figures for you. This shot was taken at 85mm at f/5.6 ISO 800 and 1/30th of a second (my 17-85 can't go any faster than that at 85mm : ( ). If I didn't have image stabilization on my lens, I think the shot would have been worse. Image stabilization or IS is good for these low light situations when you subject ISN'T moving. Luckily these corrals were moving very slowly and I was able to get a fairly sharp shot. If your subject is moving Image Stabilization doesn't do a thing...You need either a fast lens or you need to bump the ISO to get a faster shutter speed. Unfortunately my camera can't do anything higher than ISO 1600, but even at that speed there's too much noise. So I had to work with what I had.

Here's another shot that was taken at low speeds. I think the jellyfish tanks are great, but there are loads of people around and I felt bad for hogging the glass.

2)Flashes - Some exhibits allow flashes. Some don't. I actually didn't flash at all during my trip. I found that just the ambient lights were enough to cause annoying reflections in the glass. I would think with a flash it would be even worse, but I didn't try it. If you do use flash, I think it would be best to put the flash and camera as close to the exhibit glass as possible to cut down on reflections. Almost the whole time I was there I was glued to the glass with my lens...kinda felt like one of those sucker fish. The fish must of thought I was crazy :P

3) Slow shutter - When all else fails be creative...at least that's what I tried to do. Considering I couldn't freeze the motion of most of the fish with the equipment I had, I went for a more abstract look. In this pic, there were lots of fish going in the same direction. They were going fairly quick, so I went for a slow shutter speed (.6 secs) and kept the camera steady. This made a cool blur effect.

4) Panning - Another technique that I tried was panning. This is very hard, but with some practice I was getting some fairly decent shots. I know this shark photo isn't tack sharp, but the blur from panning creates a nice sense of motion IMO. This shot was taken at 1/2 sec.

5) Metering - Metering for the right light source is key in the aquarium, but it's hard with the contrasting light sources. In this pic my camera was metering for the whole shot and I was getting some weird results. I wanted the corral to be exposed properly and I wanted everything else to go black. In this case I changed my metering mode to center weighted and aimed at the corral. I locked in my exposure and recomposed. This was my result.

Ideal equipment? - I'd say a camera body with good high ISO plus fast lens are key. I was shooting ISO 800 most of the time and I could have gone higher if my camera could do it. I think either of the 5Ds, Nikon D700 or any pro body would work well. As for lenses, there are some very small things like corrals and some very big stuff like shark tanks. If I could do it again, I'd bring a 5D with one fast wide...maybe the 24mm 1.4 II and a fast telephoto...maybe the 85mm 1.8 or 100 macro.

I hope this helps anyone going to the aquarium to take photos. Anyone have good shots at the aquarium? I'd love to see other photos and see what I did right and what I did wrong. Any help appreciated...