I had some fun at the aquarium a few months ago when my wife and I accompanied our daughter and our grandchildren to a local attraction. I haven’t had many opportunities to experiment with this type of photography in the past. Expecting a crowded environment, I borrowed my wife’s OM-D E-M1 Mark III and used it with my M.Zuiko PRO 12-40 mm f/2.8 zoom.

NOTE: Click on images to enlarge.

Subject movement and lower light conditions can be a challenge when photographing in an aquarium. I experimented with shutter speeds, and tried to pan with individual fish as best I could, while capturing individual images.

Most of my photographs were captured at high ISO values, requiring noise reduction in post. I used my standard ‘double barrelled’ approach of DxO DeepPRIME set to a value of 15… with additional noise reduction with Topaz DeNoise AI as required.

There were some areas of the aquarium where I was unsuccessful trying to capture some images.

The most common factors that came into play were a lack of light… subjects were too far away… or were swimming too rapidly.

I used a single, small auto-focus point, auto white balance, and matrix metering for all of the images featured in this article.

As you’ll be able to see in the EXIF data, I shot my M.Zuiko PRO 12-40 mm f/2.8 zoom lens fully extended, and wide open, most of the time.

The auto-focusing on my wife’s E-M1 Mark III was fast and accurate which was quite helpful when photographing this subject matter.

The articulating rear screen on the E-M1 Mark III came in very handy as some of the specimen, like the seahorse above, were located towards the bottom of their display tanks, and close to the floor.

Whenever possible I removed my lens hood and pressed the front of my lens flush up against the glass panels of the displays. This helped to eliminate glare. Obviously there wasn’t much I could do with glare coming from the back of display tanks.

It was important to observe individual subjects to help my shutter release timing coincide with reduced subject movement.

Most of the time I used shutter speeds of 1/200 and 1/250, and found these were sufficient to avoid subject blur.

On rare occasions I did find some fish and other specimen that were fairly static which allowed me to use slightly slower shutter speeds.

As is the case with all photographic genres, choice of subject, composition and lighting were all important considerations.

Most of the sharks and rays were swimming too quickly to make reasonable subjects, so I focused my efforts on individuals that were much more relaxed with their movements. This made panning with them easier.

We were standing on a moving conveyor belt for much of the time at aquarium, which added some additional challenge to the task at hand.

There was a large tank of jellyfish at the aquarium. This was away from the conveyor belt which allowed me time to observe subject movement. I also had a bit more time to compose my images.

The lighting in this tank changed hues which provided some additional colour variation to my images.  The movements of the jellyfish were such that most of my photographs looked very similar in appearance.

Towards the end of my time at the jellyfish display, I experimented with stopping my lens down when capturing individuals that were close to the glass… in order to get deeper depth-of-field.

I appreciate that some folks using smaller sensor cameras try to keep their ISO values as low as possible to help reduce noise. This can be counterproductive if it results in the use of shutter speeds that are too slow for the subject matter at hand. It is usually more productive to deal with noise in post than risk blurred images.

My favourite image from our visit (other than of my grandchildren) was the photograph above. I absolutely love the lighting, shooting angle, and the jellyfish details that were revealed.

Technical Note

Photographs were captured handheld with the camera equipment  noted in the EXIF data. All images were created from RAW files using my standard process in post. This is the 1,422 article published on this website since its original inception in 2015.

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