Sea Nettle

This is a Sea Nettle (Chrysaora fuscescens) which is a common jelly in the Monterey area (and a favorite of aquarium goers there as well). This was shot drifting in Carmel Bay. It's cropped to about 60% of original pixels, partly because my buddy had deployed a surface marker buoy which is visible in one of the corners of the original shot. The buoy was to allow the boat keep track of us as we drifted with the jellies.

Digital cameras aren't supposed to do "God Beams" very well but I was very happy with this result and haven't seen too many film shots that are that much better. Other than cropping I haven't done too much to this shot. It was slightly over-exposed so I did some exposure and levels adjustments. Interestingly this image got a LOT better when I upgraded to Aperture 2. The old raw converter added lots of nasty purple artifacts at the edges of the light rays which (mostly) went away with the newer version. At some point I want to do some more comparisons with other raw converters.

If I had it to do over I'd probably shoot ISO 100 and open up slightly.

Nikon D200, Tokina 10-17 Fisheye Zoom at 17, Dual Sea and Sea YS350 strobes (with nearly dead batteries which probably didn't fire in this shot - hard to say for sure).
ISO 200, f18, 1/250, strobes at ???