During my recent Spain and Portugal photo tour, I took the group to the Barcelona Aquarium. There were a dazzling number of intriguing underwater specimens to photograph including this common octopus. To make this look like the octopus was photographed in the wild with a natural background, I took some shots of the under surface of some of the large aquariums. This looked just like the surface of the sea from the perspective of a scuba diver. So, I composited that image behind the octopus. Most of the aquariums were quite dark, and that forced me to use a high ISO. The settings for this shot were 1/80, f/4, and 12,800 ISO. I used a 24-105mm lens. In post-processing, I used Topaz DeNoise AI as well as Topaz Sharpen AI, respectively, to mitigate the noise and then to add sharpness which was necessary because I was shooting through glass. The sharpest pictures in aquariums result from using a fast shutter speed (if possible) and making the lens axis perpendicular to the glass or Plexiglas. As soon as the camera is angled with respect to the plane of the glass, image quality suffers.
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