Put it on a lab bench, next to a human hand and some printer paper. Or a banana. Anything the reader might recognize.
"While some ultra-black fish might appear brownish, it’s the product of camera overexposure and editing" Great. You know what does that mean? You need to find a better photo. That's what it means. What kind of lazy caption that is.
>Incidentally, this is what initially piqued Karen Osborn's interest. As a research zoologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, she grew frustrated trying to photograph a striking black fish that had been pulled from the deep sea. "It didn't matter how you set up the camera or lighting—they just sucked up all the light," says Osborn.
They aren't even black, to us. We evolved to see things in sunlight. These fish are black at the wavelengths present in the deep. That isn't sunlight but luminescence. Shine sunlight on them and they could be any colour, something irrelevant for a fish that may well live without ever seeing sunlight. So we have a black fish illuminated by a light our eyes were not designed to see, in a place so dark we see can see nothing. Those aren't great preconditions for an accurate photoshoot.
Presumably Mr. Davis is a human, and is describing the black hole-ness of these fish as he perceived them. In the sunlight. With his eyes. I would like a picture of that. Because seeing is believing.
"They aren't even black, to us." You make this whole mythology up about how the fish are. I'm not sure why. Yes they are black. Anything with that reflectivity will be black to us. But we don't have to argue about that, we can just look at this picture of a Pacific Blackdragon: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwGT8egWEAAtdMf.jpg
Funny that the one in your picture isn't. The lighting is so poor in that photo. There is more shadow than illumination, and many parts of the fish are definitely not black.
Proper black looks more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY4YX-ofE60
Those photos are actually very good. They show in clear detail how those fish look like, including colors (not all entirely black). They are indeed missing a clear indication of their size (that could be artificial), but otherwise there isn't much to improve.
Sure thing. In that environment that is true. I bet they didn't measure their reflectivity in the deep, but on a lab bench though.
"A dead fish is too different from a living one, so it's not worth picturing them."
Maybe so, except that's not true. Here is a picture of a common fangtooth: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a6/cd/3f/a6cd3f0a9cc47b9794fa... And here is an other one: https://insider.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/fangtooth-...
Any of these pictures would have been better to illustrate their colour.