Fish Portraits

As well as festivals and temples, another common subject for my photographs is fish. There are several reasons for this. The main one is that they are easy to access - being trapped in tanks down at the aquarium, they can't get away. Secondly, you can take hundreds of pictures of them in a short space of time (two hours is normally the most I can concentrate on photography these days). This picture was taken at Tokyo Tower Aquarium. Most people don't seem to be aware that there are fish tanks on the ground floor - I suppose they are too focused on seeing the sights from the top to notice the small aquarium sign on the ground floor. Anyway, I have spent several happy hours there, mostly taking pictures of the deep water fish. The tropical varities are colourful, but I find them boring on the whole, I prefer the huge, ugly creatures from the great lakes or deep sea. With these you also have the advantage of their interest in lights; they are attracted by your flash or autofocus light instead of being frightened, so they will swim over and look at you through the glass, giving you great photo opportunities. Once you start photographing them, you realise that they all have different faces and unique facial expressions. You might not normally think of fish as having personalities, but looking at some of my photos, I can imagine that they do. Some of them even remind me of people I know. This one here looks a bit gormless to me, and it does remind me of a certain man, though I wont say who. Not because he might read it - which would be impossible, as he is dead now - but because it wouldn't be nice to be compared to a fish. I have a whole file of these pictures. I call them my "fish portraits".