Aquarium Photography Tips from Debbie & Stan

Saltwater Aquariums

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Saltwater Aquariums

Aquarium Photography
Tips from Debbie & Stan

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This is a picture of one of the Jellyfish exhibits that we took during Our Waikiki Aquarium Tour with J. Charles Delbeek. The Mastigias papua is a species of jellyfish found in the saltwater lakes of the Rock Islands of Palau in the South Pacific. Here's how we took our original photo and fixed it to make it a better image.

Photo Information

Camera Used: Kodak 35mm Instamatic
Film Used: Kodak Gold 100 ASA
Film Processing: Through our local drug store.
Distance Photos Were Taken: About two feet away in a squatting position to shoot at an angle upwards towards the aquarium.

Photography Tips

Tip 1: What made this shot hard to get was that the aquarium was a tall cylinder shape, the room was dark, and our camera did not have an automatic flash shut off feature. With the rounded shape of the aquarium, how not to get the reflection of the flash in the picture was puzzling. With most flat surface aquarium fronts you can stand at an angle and shoot from the side of the aquarium to avoid this problem. But rounded? We ended up stooping down and shooting up from the bottom. We wouldn't know the result of our endeavors until after the film was developed. As you can see, we did end up with some flash reflection, but in the long run it is one of our favorite photographs we have ever taken.

Tip 2: Make sure you take more than one shot of a particular subject at various distances and positions. Undoubtedly some of the pictures will come out better than others, so this way you have many to choose from to work with, rather than relying on one single shot that may or may not be a good photo.

Photo Editing Techniques

< Step 1
We created this image by using the MS Paint Program that came loaded on our computer. Taking our original photo and using the paintbrush tool set on black, we painted over the complete background area. This covered up the flash reflection, and any other minor imperfections in the picture. We also painted over the small portion of jellyfish showing at the top, and the half jellyfish at the bottom right of the image to remove them.

Editing Tip 1: Be sure when you load an original photo for editing that you immediately "save as" under another name. (Example: jellyfishorg might be saved as jellyfish1). In the MS Paint program we know that often during editing there comes a point where you cannot undo somthing you did. By resaving the image under another name before beginning work on it, you still have the original version to start over with if need be.

Editing Tip 2: It is much easier to paint or cover up an area when trying to work around the edges and fine areas of the picture you do not want to disturb by viewing the photo in the "zoom" or "large size" mode.

Step 2 >
We took the above photo created in Step 1 and loaded it onto our Polaroid PhotoMax Pro program. We then chose the Rectangle Select Tool, outlined the area of the photo we wanted to keep, and then cut or cropped out this portion of the image by clicking on the Crop Tool (scissor image), which created a completely new picture that we then saved under a new name.

< Step 3
Lastly we took the saved cropped image created in Step 2 and used the Sharpen Filters > Sharpen Lightly command found under the Enhance section of the top menu to reduce some of the fuzziness in the image, and this is the final results.

~ Debbie & Stan Hauter

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