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Rainbow Surfperch Monterey Bay Aquarium

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Photo of a striped surfperch, Embiotoca lateralis at Monterey Bay Aquarium You could prove me wrong and tell me this is not a parrot fish, but I believe it is after going through EVERY fish on the Monterey Bay Aquarium website. The photo they have of a parrot fish has the fish hiding in the rock so you don't get a very good view of him, but they do say that "their coloring ranges from reds to greens, blues and yellows, as well as grays, browns and blacks." I wish I'd made a note of the fish when I was there, but I didn't and it's well over a year since I was there.

Here's an update on what kind of fish this is; a kind member of the aquarium posted the below comment pointing out that the fish is actually a striped surfperch, Embiotoca lateralis. Thanks, "Aquaken"!
The Monterey Bay Aquarium located on the southern end of Monterey Bay on California's coast is one of the most amazing places you could ever get to visit. If you are ever in the area, make sure you get there. You won't be disappointed.

It was a pretty hard environment in which to take photos. Of course the fish are constantly on the move, people are pushing to get to the glass, and light is low. So to risk blurring you have to take a fairly short exposure, which means you have to go very high on the ISO selection. There was either a lot of stuff floating in the water, or there was water splashed on the glass, but in the original photo there are a lot of white blobs in the water around the fish. So I had to do something to remove this distraction and used Photoshop radial blur filter to eliminate them as well as to give a sense of motion about the fish. It's what you call making the most of a less-than-prefect shot.

Canon EOS 20D
1/100sec at f/5
ISO800
70~300mm lens at 170mm




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Comments

aquaken said…
Looks like a Striped surfperch, Embiotoca lateralis, to me. (I'm on staff at the aquarium.) Parrotfish are in the tropical section of the Splash Zone gallery.

It is a nice shot!
July 18, 2007 at 8:50 AM
Anonymous said…
I love this shot, you really did make the most of it. It looks like the fish is making tiny movements that are echoing in the water. Very nice.
July 29, 2007 at 6:25 AM
Anonymous said…
Nice shot. Here's a correction on the identification - it is a Rainbow surfperch. The scientific name is Hypsurus caryi

Jeff
June 7, 2008 at 8:57 PM
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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival

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The 15th anniversary Pasifika Festival poster — a collage of the Pacific cultures the festival celebrates. On Saturday 10 March 2007, I spent the day at the Pasifika Festival at Western Springs Park in Auckland. It was the festival's 15th year — an annual celebration of Pacific Island cultures that has been part of Auckland's calendar since 1993, and which typically draws crowds of well over 100,000 across the day. Nine Pacific villages are traditionally represented — Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Niue, Fiji, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Kiribati and Tahiti — with music, dance, food, arts, and craft from each community sharing the same park for the day. I usually visit New Zealand earlier in February, but in 2007 I was there in March and it was the first — and, to date, only — time I've been able to attend Pasifika. I hope to make it back one of these years. But I came away from that single visit with the str...
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Before and After: Two Joshua Tree Photographs, Two Painterly Reworkings

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I want to try something a little different in this post — a working walk-through of how two of my Joshua Tree photographs from April of 2011 became two of my newest painterly artworks on Redbubble. Same compositions, same landscape, same afternoon in the Mojave. Very different final pieces. The Raw Photographs Both photographs were taken on a single afternoon trip to Joshua Tree National Park, shot in Canon raw (.CR2) format on my Canon EOS. Raw files are, as any photographer knows, deliberately flat — they carry the maximum amount of information the sensor recorded, without any of the punchy contrast, saturation, or sharpening that a JPEG would apply automatically in-camera. That flatness is a feature: it gives the photographer the widest possible latitude to make choices in post-processing. But it also means a raw file, straight out of the camera, doesn't look like the scene the eye remembers. It looks like the scene the sensor saw, drained of atmosphere. Here are the two r...
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