New to Newport :).

No excuses this time, will straightaway start on the post :-D. We went to the Newport aquarium on a weekend about two weeks back. We have known about it almost since the time I have been here in Lexington. The reason that we are visiting it only now is because personally I am not too fond of aquariums. I am of the belief that once you have seen one, you have seen them all :-p. But well, having Snugli to cater for (;-) :-D), we have to come up with different things for her to enjoy (a zoo visit is long overdue :-D). Since she always loves the "fishies" in the doctors' office (the only thing she loves about those :-D), we thought she'd enjoy a visit to the aquarium.

And she did :). The only problem we had with the entire visit was a slow irritating drizzling rain that lingered that entire day :-p. Well, aquariums are indoor environments, so I can't really complain about the rain now, can I? :-p.




What with my photography experimentation, I wasn't always with Sri and Snugli, but we had a good time whenever I was able to catch up with them :-D. Sri was saying that Snugli would go to a fish tank and call out to the fishes "Fishy baa illi" (Fishy, come here) and most fishes don't really take kindly to human presence, so they'd promptly run away :-D. We did touch a sting ray together :-D.




Then spent some nice time in front of a hugggggggggge fish tank :).




The aquarium even had a children play area which Snugli enjoyed.




Actually I think I enjoyed it more than she did, because they had a frogger machine :-D. I must have gone back to it some 10 times, hehehehe :).

My favourite part of the whole experience was being able to touch a shark (it was not a full-fledged shark, but I digress :-p) :). I had never touched neither a shark nor a sting ray before that :). Sri didn't want to get his hands fishy :-D, while Snugli tried her best, but couldn't reach any of the sharks (the pool was a bit deep, even though it doesn't look deep).




And that was that. As for my photography, I researched quite a bit about photography in aquariums, but didn't get any concrete settings for a correct photo. So I had to experiment quite a bit (Manual mode, Aperture (f2.7 - f3.5), Shutter speed (1/125 to 1/13), White balance (Tungsten, Fluorescent) and ISO (400)). Most sites suggested a tripod, so I carried it with me (yeah didn't forget the plate this time), but hardly used it as it wasn't easy to avoid the glass glare while using it. Moreover high ISO resulted in noisy photos, so had to use some image manipulation (noise reduction, brightness/contrast settings change) which I am not too fond of (its a necessary evil sometimes, but not always - I'll talk more about my views on it in some other post). With all that, I am not very happy with the photos, need to do more research :). Here are some photos I am okay with ;-) :).




Loved this red fella (the photo is a little blurry, I wish I could have taken a better one) :).





The aquarium also had a small aviary, so took this one of a parrot (forgot to change the ISO, so the noise has been reduced :-D)..




Jelly fish - have to mention this, the music there for the jelly fish section was so apt for the way they moved :).




This is my best of the series I think - its a variety of jelly fish (took it in super-macro mode flat against the aquarium glass)..




The next 2 snaps are movement photos (the background is blurry because of the movement and the subjects are harder to capture this way, so I'm proud of myself :-D) - first one of a shark..




And one of a penguin - this fella was hell bent on doing tricks in the water to please the crowd of children watching :).




Hope you enjoyed the show. Want to write a set of posts within this week (as I said, we have camping, zoo trips within May and a long much-awaited trip coming up in June, so my to-be-written-posts-quota will rise higher and higher if I am not done with some stuff soon :-\), but lets see how it goes :).