Shark watch

I extended my trip in Sydney at the end of March by a day so that I was assured of a free day in which to explore the city both through the camera and just through my own eyes.  What that extra 24 hours gained me was time to do the Bondi to Coogee walk, to see the cockatoos up close in the Botanic Gardens, to watch the sun set behind the Opera House and, on the morning before I flew home, to pay a return visit to Sydney Aquarium.

Two things struck me about the aquarium on this, my second visit.  The first was how little it had changed in the five years since I first visited.  And secondly, how expensive it had become to visit – with entry for an adult costing $35.  In fact, that could be said for Sydney in general, which I found to be much more expensive on this occasion than on my previous visit (and when your reference point is the price of things in Dublin, that suggests it must be pretty darn expensive).

What the $35 ticket allowed me do – as well as kill time after a hotel checkout and before an afternoon flight home – was to bring my beloved Nikon D700 into a low-light underwater world where I hoped it would thrive in a way that the Fuji Finepix s5000 I had previously brought here just couldn’t.  And it largely did.  It would have done better if only those fish didn’t keep moving.

Large parts of the aquarium are, for the benefit of the creatures living there, quite dark.  Photographically speaking, they are f/2.8 @ ISO 3200 dark.  And while I could keep my camera steady and dial the shutter down to 1/30s or even 1/20s where it wanted to be for some of those dark corners, all that keeping things still on my part didn’t make a blind bit of difference while the turtle or sea horse or octopus or eel insisted on moving.

It’s an important lesson in slow shutter speed photography actually – no matter how steady you can keep the camera, be that with a solid-as-a-rock hold-your-breath-and-squeeze-the-shutter-when-your-heart-is-between-beats kind of grip or a sophisticated highly engineered stabilized VR or IS lens with it’s floating element to buy you an extra two stops of shutter before camera shake has an effect, if your subject is moving it’s all a tad irrelevant.  Your camera can be welded to a tripod which is itself bolted to the ground, and you can be absolutely sure that it won’t move a nanometer during the exposure, but if that subject moves you’re going to get motion blur in the exposure that is, more often than not, going to ruin it for you.

If you find yourself, like I did in the aquarium, getting frustrated by moving subjects in dark environments there are three things you may be able to do.  You might be able to add light – that wasn’t an option for me where I was shooting through glass, and where many of the darker exhibits are dark for a reason, and they ask you not to use flash photography.  You may be able to just go somewhere that has more light, or at least shoot something that has more light falling on it.  Or you may get better results shooting wide – focal length, as well as aperture.

The shot above is a consequence of me trying the latter two escapes – having given up on crisp shots of sharks and stingrays from the underwater viewing tunnel, I turned my attention to the tunnel itself, the people in it, and went to the widest end of the focal range of the lens to take in a view of the whole area.

There were shafts of light coming down through the water above, and I just had to wait for a face to stop in one of those shafts of light for long enough for me to get this photo.  I had pre-focused on where the lady at the bottom left is standing, and had already decided that the composition you see here would be what I’d look for, with, all going well, a creature of some sort filling the top right.

All went well, and the resultant image you see up top is one of my favourites from that morning.  A few more favourites will follow over the next few days.