In reference to another aquarium thread several weeks ago, I thought that the visit to the aquarium was a great opportunity to work under less than ideal conditions.
No flash was used, all pictures taken with 70-200mm f/4L IS.
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Decided not to pan the camera and let the fish swim by (that way, silhouette of my daughter remains in sharper outline). In combination with the seaweed, the foreground figure reminds me of a typical scene from MST3K
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Jellyfish
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Blue Tang aka Dory. Not much to merit in terms of composition but the lens captured a surface texture I was not aware of after all the years of visiting the aquarium.
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Loggerhead Sea Turtle - the aquarium used to have two large venerable turtles but one of them died. Now the tank has a new addition.
What I learned:
Faster the lens, the better (duh, so obvious but worth mentioning - f/3.5 on 17-85 @ 17mm is the fastest I have but it quickly goes to f/5 and beyond).
Be ready to manually focus
Take a lot of pictures and set the camera to continuous shooting (also, don't bother with activating in-camera noise reduction -- aside from slowing down fps, NR can be accomplished in PP stage).
Be aware of the reflection on the glass - because of my lens choice, I had to stand back from the tank most of the time.
Do not wear white or light color clothing as it will contribute to the reflection - I wore dark blue T and jeans. IMO, dark blue works better than black.
Carry a white balance reference and adjust the white balance for each tank (which I did not do for all tanks - too much to ask from my daughter each time). ***edit*** just taking a picture of the card/reference with the light from the tank reflecting (not glaring) off it would suffice - then use the white balance pick tool during PP.
The visit made me reinforce my thinking that between 70-200mm and the kit lens (17-85), a fast prime @ < f/2 (35mm f1.4L - drool) would be nice to have. Realistically speaking, 50mm f/1.4 is probably the most likely candidate as I have always owned one when I toted a film SLR (my heart tells me to go for Sigma while my head tells me to go for Canon). It's 80mm on crop sensor, but I find that I am using the 50mm range a lot with my kit lens.
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, 135mm f/2.0
