The “The Secret Lives of Seahorses” exhibit at the Aquarium was one of the more crowded ones. It was also one of the more difficult ones to shoot. Flash was not allowed and a lot of the tanks were curved, which made getting an in-focus difficult or impossible in some cases. However, there was at least one flat, well lit tank that I got some good pictures out of.
One of the big attractions at the Monterey Bay Aquarium was their Jellyfish display. It is, by far the best display I have ever seen. It was surprisingly easy to photograph as well. One of the displays was of small jellyfish that had scintillating multi-colored lights running along their body. That is something that just doesn’t show on a still photograph, so I shot a bit of video. The edited sequence is about a minute-and-a-half long and included in this post and the Flickr set.
During my trip to San Francisco, I went down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I can see why it is considered one of the best aquariums in the world. It was quite impressive. This post just scratches the surface of the aquarium and over the next several days I will be posting individual areas of the aquarium not covered here, including the Sea Dragons, Jellyfish, Otters, and Seals.
For being at an aquarium, I actually didn’t take many pictures of fish. However, I did take some, and some of penguins, included below.
There were, of course, a variety of traditional and other animals at the zoo as well.
At the risk of causing some trouble doing birds near cats…. The zoo has quite a selection of birds in the bird house, behind glass, and a walk through atrium with birds.
Back to the Houston Zoo…. I finally finished processing all the Zoo pictures, so the next few posts will be about the Zoo again. This time, Cats… The cat area is rather small, but has a nice variety. I managed to get some fairly nice pictures of the cats who were somewhat active.
Something rather notable about the Houston Zoo, to me, was the number of birds on display. Their collection seems to be considerably larger than most other zoos I have been to. Unfortunately, the cage design made it difficult to get good pictures.
One of our visits in Houston was to the Zoo. The zoo is very nice and we arrived mid-afternoon and started in the Aquarium near the entrance. Other parts of the zoo to follow.
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In addition to the mineral display, the Houston Science and Natural History Museum has a large butterfly atrium. They have a large variety of butterflies flying around, year round.
The National Zoo has a fairly large selection of small mammals in their small mammal house. When I was there, the Golden Lion Tamarins (pictured above) had taken over a lot of the areas in the house (or were mixed in with other animals) but they are usually in an outside habitat. There were still plenty of other animals to see though.
