Yesterday’s post about Sydney and my trawl through my archives – my use of the word “archive” suggests a dark shelved room full of dusty old boxes and a ledger with details of what shelf and in what box you might find each image but, disappointingly, it’s just a somewhat disorganized collection of 1s and 0s which resides on an external hard disk – got me looking back over the other photos I took in Australia and reminded me that I had previously intended to post more of them.
This photograph was taken in a place I shall almost certainly revisit – the Sydney Aquarium. I remember at the time this being one of those photographs that I “saw” before I took it – that is, I previsualized the final image in my head before ever raising the camera to my eye. Five years ago it was the exception for me to do that – often I took a photo, and then “found” the image within what my camera captured later on in post-processing, which often meant cropping what I had originally captured. Nowadays “seeing” the shot is the rule rather than exception for me, but that’s not to say that I always manage to capture what I see. Maybe that comes with time too.
Anyway, in this case the shot I got is exactly what I was hoping to get, and I can still recall the feeling of success that brought. I spotted the sign first, and found it to be a clever way of getting across the point while retaining a sense of humour. While there’s no doubting the seriousness of the message, it’s not as ominous a sign as others you might see.
All I needed to get the photo was for the crocodile to play ball, and after a short wait he duly obliged and walked out of the shadows into my frame. I think this sense of him emerging from the shadows at the top left of the frame is important to the drama of the picture, and almost a contrast to the humour of the sign at the right. I chose a wide aperture to focus on the crocodile, knowing that the text would still be readable in the foreground. I also shot an image with the focus on the text, and the crocodile out of focus, but it’s not as effective. The colour in the shot has a cast due to the artificial lights that were lighting the enclosure in the dark aquarium, and because I shot it in JPEG mode I can’t do much to remove that now. Had I shot in RAW mode I could have adjusted the white balance in post-processing to compensate for the lights, which I suspect from the cast are a mixture of fluorescent and tungsten.
Technical info for this image: f/2.8 @ 1/30s, ISO 200, 8.4mm focal length, Fuji Finepix s5000
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