Sea jellies: Northeast Pacific sea nettle and spotted lagoon jelly

I said in a previous post I would share my amateurish experience on a photoshoot, so here it is! I encourage you to click on each photo to see a larger view. If you like what you see, please subscribe to this blog to receive updates of the new photos I post, usually 3 to 5 times a week.

A couple of weekends ago, I visited the SeaLife aquarium next to LEGOLAND California. They recently added a sea jelly exhibit (also known as jelly fish, even though they are not fish), which contains several tanks with various species of jellies swimming around. The lighting of the exhibit is very colorful, which makes it for a fun visual experience, but not so great for photos since many of the lights reflect onto the tanks, making for photos covered with many colored spots. The water tanks are cylindrical so people can view the sea jellies from all around. Again this is great for viewing but not so much for taking photos since you can see the people on the other side of the tank. If you’re patient, you can wait until they leave and find the right angle. Or you can play around in Photoshop as I did for one of the photos below since the background was very compromised.

There were several tanks with moon jellies but I won’t share any photos here because they didn’t come out well that day. I do have photos of moon jellies if you’re interested in viewing them.

These first creatures are called Northeast Pacific sea nettles. This is the second photo I took in the exhibit with my good camera.

And right then and there, my camera shut down because the battery was dead. Hum, no problem, I thought, I’ll just use the other battery I have in my bag. This would have been a brilliant idea if I had actually remembered to charge that other battery when it died a few weeks ago. So there I stood, dozens of cool sea jellies floating around me with no working camera. But wait, I had my cell phone camera with me. 5MP would work but how about the lighting? And that’s when I thought, what the heck, I have nothing to lose.

So here they are, the rest of my sea jelly photos, taken with my cell phone camera and retouched in Photoshop since I couldn’t change any settings as I took the photos. Even though a lot of the photos were blurry and useless, I’m quite impressed with the way these came out.

I love the golden brown color of their bodies, especially when it’s backlit as in the photo.

This next and last one is a spotted lagoon jelly, a smaller species of jellies. I took a lot of pictures of them but this is the crispest one I managed to get. However the background was horrible, between the many light reflections and several people standing right there. So I decided to delete the whole background and add one in Photoshop, almost black but not completely, with a light grain to match the not so perfect tank water.