Pterois Miles

I don't know why, but when I look at this photo, it appears to me that the fish is just about to burp.

I mentioned in a previous post how challenging I found photographing fish at an aquarium to be.  This is one of the keepers that came from the session at Moody Gardens.  The reason it came out well is that a lionfish is slow-moving.  It doesn't swim so much as it floats from place to place.  At least in it's normal, calm state.  Maybe when it's excited it can swim more quickly and deliberately.  Anyway, that's why this picture is fairly sharp.  I remember though that the hallway in which this tank resided was particularly dark, so it's not as sharp as it could be.  The photo was shot at ISO 3200, which is further than I'm usually willing to go with ISO before noise just becomes too much to bear.  It took two rounds of noise reduction - one on the RAW file, then another to get rid of residual noise that got amplified by the post-processing I did.  And even so, it's still a pretty noisy photo.  But at modest sizes, it looks good and I like the colors a lot.  I overlayed a texture on the background, which gave it a more dreamy quality and also resulted in those neat little bubbles you can see in the upper-right.