Wonderful Surprise
Well, tonight was pretty much like every other night when I got home from work. That was until my dogs started barking which is pretty unusual in itself. So, we went out the back to investigate what all the fuss was and we were amazed at what we saw!
Well, what we saw was a Koala - Yes, the Native Australian animal.
You might think this is not that unusaul, except that our hose is a normal suburban house approximately 3km away from what is the natural habitat of this creature.
Of course, I dashed inside and grabbed a Camera and started taking a heap of photos! I Took around 80 Photos before He decided that he was going to jump my fence and head off towards some huge gum trees next to a main road. I was fortunate in that I was able to get within about 2 feet of the Koala which is a wild animal and take photos and even used flash!
So, I came back inside and grabbed the other camera with the bigger zoom on it and walked around the block and shot around another 40 or so pictures of the little fellow up in the tree.
Now, about the photo's. It was late afternoon and the light of course was very varied. It started out at being almost full sunlight low in the Horizon, but over the course of the hour and a half before dark it progressively got darker.
I started shooting with mt short lens (14-54mm) at ISO 100, and as the light faded I upped the ISO so I could shoot at reasonable speeds. I did have to resort to adding some additional light in the form of a bit of fill flash. I kept shooting as many shots as I could while He was in my yard.
Now, by the time he decided to leave, I grabbed my 2nd camera and set it to 400 ISO knowing I would be shooting at 200mm. I managed to keep the shutter speed up around 1/500 sec. At the end, as the light was rapidly fading, I had to jump to 800 ISO, and when the shutter speed fell to 1/160sec I knew that there was insufficient light to keep going.
Out of the 119 total images I took, I selected 35 out of the 119 and processed them and put them into a Gallery. Out of the 35, I selected 7 and processed them ready for print - I'll be getting them printed as 6x8" tomorrow.
Take a look at my Koala Gallery and let me know what you think of my chance encounter of one of our native Creatures.
