Canon Elan IIe, tripod Sigma 105 Macro Fuji Provia 100F Exposure unrecorded

The Start of it All

Not long after moving to Florida, I was wandering down on the beach one morning, and spotted a strange object washing up to shore. It tells you what kind of guy that I am that I just grabbed it to see what it was (I do, at least, assure myself that it's not something that will do me any harm).

This one turned out to be a dead starfish, pretty beat and missing three complete arms. Or at least, I had thought it was dead, but after a moment in my hands I noticed some glacial movement from it. Since I also often carry ziplock bags with me on my wanderings, I popped it in there with some seawater and took him home.

A tupperware container, a little sand, a few rocks, and I had a sea floor stage. While it certainly wasn't an ideal specimen, it did serve to provide me with some closeups of the pseudopods and the mouth opening on the underside. I was also able to observe that it had lost the arms at different times, since one was not only healed, but showing signs of regrowth. After my photos, I returned it to the same place I found it, and noticed that several starfish in similar shape were washing up. Tough day on the ocean. I tossed them all out into deeper water to give them a better chance of surviving.

And while I had done aquarium photography before for controlled handling of aquatic subjects, at this point in my life, with easy proximity to marine wildlife, I decided to set up a small aquarium and maintain it as temporary housing for whatever I might catch. And so it began...