Around 1980, David Packard’s daughter Nancy [not Julie as I had originally said] went to her dad with a request. Julie had studied as a marine biologist and thought that having a nice aquarium in Monterey, California, would be just the thing. So after fooling around a bit with feasibility studies and such, dad, co-founder of electronics giant Hewlett-Packard, wrote her a check for $30 million. It was money well spent. The Monterey Bay Aquarium is an enduring institution.

We visited most recently on a weekday afternoon. The aquarium was a zoo! (Sorry about that.) It was packed with families, each family having a dozen or so squealing children in a loose pack, or so it seemed. That’s the way it should be. Summer is a time for families and children, and I would worry if the aquarium did not delight them all. We’ll return again on a chilly winter day, when minus the crowds I can contemplate the fish eye-to-eye and photograph the exhibits as an old man ought.

I did get a few pocket camera photos at the aquarium, and they served to remind me of some of the problems at such a venue. Many people were taking pictures with the flash on. That’s going to get pictures of the white reflection off the glass, not the fish. It’s better to seek the well-lit exhibits. Getting up against the glass avoids reflections and steadies the camera, but don’t prevent the lens from adjusting to focus. Better to very carefully rest a forearm on the glass; that keeps off fingerprint smears as well. Some exhibits are dark with the sea creatures highlighted from above. These have to be underexposed by at least two stops below automatic to keep the background dark.

I wanted to show the aquarium building with the crowd. This is a panorama spliced at the level of the lower part of the stairway. The motion of the crowd must be out of the splice zone or it will look double-exposed.

For the tank with the kelp, I lightened the shadows on the left part of the image and substantially increased the contrast on the right in Photoshop™.

A number of my “crowd in front of tank” photos failed because I did not underexpose enough. This tank was bright enough to render the people as silhouettes.

The bright lighting allows a good autoexposure from a distance.

Anemones are good marine subjects because they don’t race around like those uncooperative fish, making long exposures more tolerable.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium deserves a place on your list of places to visit. Their website has interesting webcams until that opportunity arises.