Craft Central: Aquarium Pics!!!

Ok, so for my birthday yesterday, I went Gatlinburg with my family and friend. First I had to do an online class, then we ate Mexican. :) After that we headed up to Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies where my friend and I met our photography class for a photography field trip at the Aquarium that had been scheduled the week before. I chose some of my favorite pictures from the Aquarium to put on my photography page but when I realized I had chosen 86 out of 351, I decided to make a separate post. So if you don't want to see 86 pictures, then you should probably stop reading now :)

First up, stingrays! I was taking these through the glass, there was another area where you could touch the stingrays, but I didn't take any pictures there, I was more focused on touching them :)

Smile!

They look a little like ghosts from certain angles in certain lighting... :)

The diver was feeding them at this time. It was really cool watching her swim around with them!

Some strange kind of fish. If you look really closely, you can see its eyes. They kind of look like they're sitting on top of their heads.

Poison frogs! There is a blue one and a yellow one in this picture.

More frogs. Poison frogs :) This time their are two yellow ones...

A moray eel, I think this was called. I am pretty sure they were asleep, they just kind of sat there the whole time.

Some of my favorites! The JELLYFISH!!! :) (which are apparently more commonly called "jellies") These weren't the big ones though, those come later.

The underside of a jellyfish... I also liked the colors of them in the water. It was really bright! :)

Black and White! This is one of my favorite pictures that I took the whole time. The top one looks kind of like it's glowing.

Scorpion fish! These also kind of just sat around the whole time...

Can you spot the flounder in this picture? Hint: It blends in... :)

I'm pretty sure these were called garden eels. Apparently these eels stay in the same spot like forever and eat the plankton in the water as they come by. They wiggle their heads (I guess they're called heads anyway) a lot though.

In this picture, the one in the back, that is stretched up the highest, had just eaten a plankton. It was cool how it all of a sudden moved so fast!

These colors were pretty...

So these little things cracked my friend and I up. On her camera (remember, we were there for a photography field trip so we literally took pictures of everything) there was a little red light that flashed when she pushed the shutter button halfway. The tubes you see sticking up from the coral had little fuzzies that came out the top but when she shone the light on them, the little fuzzies would jerk themselves back insides the tubes. We're not sure why they did that, but it was really funny and we had a good time laughing :) We must have spent at least 15 minutes over there!

Fish...

Starfish...

More fish...

And more fish... hmmm... maybe I should call these... fishies! :)

If you look closely, you can see a seahorse "hiding" in the little plant. I waited forever for this shot! :)

When it moved...

A sea dragon! Although it looks more like the skeleton of a dragon maybe... I don't know.

A better picture of the sea dragon. These things move really slow!

SHARK! :) So as my friend and I are walking, well, moving on the "conveyor belt", through the tunnel, we come to a part where a lot of sharks apparently hang out and saw this sign on the glass. And this is literally what it said. "These scratches are on the glass due to a SHARK ATTACK (no, they weren't capitalized on the sign) on December 15, 2000". My friend freaked out when we realized that there were actually these big scratches on the glass but I was like, well, that was almost 14 years ago and since we haven't seen any more signs, I think we're good! Anyway, it was near the end of the tunnel :)

Another shark.

As I see this, I go "hey! this looks like a brain!" and as I'm taking the picture, my friend reads the sign under it and says, "oh, its called a brain coral". Gee, I wonder why?! :)

Fish...

Another fish...

Horseshoe crabs! I love these things, which explains the next pictures :)

In the process of picking it up.

Yes, I am holding it, it is just hard to tell because we weren't allowed to take it out of the water cause then it couldn't breathe.

Touching one of the bigger ones. We weren't allowed to pick them up if they were buried in sand or with a bunch of other crabs. This one was buried in sand, well, half-buried in sand, so we just touched it.

A bunch of crabs.

I think I'm supposed to be a deep sea diver in this picture :)

Fish...

Hi! The glass on these tanks was round and made you look really weird when you got inside :)

This fish looked like a potato.

A blowfish! I tried to get it to blow up, but it wouldn't :/...

Clownfish!

Fish...

And the big jellyfish! These changed colors and were really cool!

This is my absolute favorite picture! I love it!

Black and white. I realized that black and white pictures of jellyfish look really cool :)

And back to color...

So these next few pictures are of the same exact jellyfish, it just changed about 4 different colors in about 15 seconds! First, it was green... (and sorry this picture is a little blurry)

Then red...

And pink...

And finally, orange! I took this at a different angle but it's still the same one!

Penguins!

Big fuzzy starfish.

Cuttlefish!

This is my favorite cuttlefish picture!

A parrot fish. It's mouth kind of looks like a parrot beak. I'm guessing that's why it's called a parrotfish :)

Ok, so I spent forever trying to get a good picture of this octopus because they rarely come out and if they do, they rarely move. Anyway, I haven't edited any of these and they're some of my best but I am going to edit the blurriness out of the rest and post some more.