Sea Walnut (Mnemiopsis leidyi)

Jellyfish are, to put it simply, bastards. They know when you’re trying to take their picture and they will jet away just as you push the button, or another one will photobomb in front, or they’ll schedule their feeding with the aquarium staff so the water gets all cloudy just at the time when you’re ready to set up.

So it’s always a shock when I get a usable shot that shows the structure of the jelly, much less one that shows the individual glints of light that pop up when a sea walnut moves its cilia around.

Originally posted at stories.starmind.org.

Sea Walnut (Mnemiopsis leidyi)

One of the other four shots out of four hundred that actually turned out.

Originally posted at stories.starmind.org.

Dwarf Seahorse (Hippocampus zosterae)

I’m pretty proud of this one.

Most “real” photographers talk about how they pre-visualize the shot and what they do to make it happen. Because I work with animals that I haven’t trained and usually have no control over what they do or their environment, pre-visualization seldom works for me. However, when you know a species pretty well, you can guess what they’re going to do. This helps to get you positioned to get a good shot. Many of mine are like that.

However, in a very few number of cases, you can also control lighting and position. If you’re not shooting around bars or trees, like in an aquarium, you have more flexibility. (You actually lost angle capability due to refraction, but there’s no need to get into that right now.)

So when I saw the translucency of the sea weed, and I knew the habit of sea horses to slowly drift and then anchor with their tails, it was just a matter of determining where I wanted the light to be and then I waited.

This is one of the very few shots that turned out almost exactly as I intended.

Originally posted at stories.starmind.org.