Category Archives: Fish

Archer Fish

Archer Fish_1

Quiz time! These fish are called “archer” fish because:

i) When they get excited, they quiver.
*) During breeding season, they make a noise that sounds like “Phrasing!”
c) The odds are ever in their favor.
4) They shoot insects with jets of water.
д) Their long lives pass like swift draughts of the sweet mead.
ζ) They are unhealthily obsessed with the death of their city.

Fish

Fish_1

For a while, a long time ago, I was puzzled over the fact that both water (mostly made of hydrogen and oxygen) and air (mostly nitrogen with a bit of carbon and oxygen for flavor) were clear when most things made of those atoms are not.

Then I realized that eyes evolved in water and then moved to land.

Dwarf Seahorse (Hippocampus zosterae)

Dwarf Seahorse (Hippocampus zosterae)_7

I’m pretty proud of this one.

Most “real” photographers talk about how they pre-visualize the shot and what they do to make it happen. Because I work with animals that I haven’t trained and usually have no control over what they do or their environment, pre-visualization seldom works for me. However, when you know a species pretty well, you can guess what they’re going to do. This helps to get you positioned to get a good shot. Many of mine are like that.

However, in a very few number of cases, you can also control lighting and position. If you’re not shooting around bars or trees, like in an aquarium, you have more flexibility. (You actually lost angle capability due to refraction, but there’s no need to get into that right now.)

So when I saw the translucency of the sea weed, and I knew the habit of sea horses to slowly drift and then anchor with their tails, it was just a matter of determining where I wanted the light to be and then I waited.

This is one of the very few shots that turned out almost exactly as I intended.