A Day at the Zoo
Today, I spent a few hours at the Adelaide Zoo. It is something I have been meaning to do for a long time, but just never gotten around to it.
As far as Zoo's go, it is not huge, but it does have a reasonable number of animals on exhibition. Of course, one of the reasons to go to the Zoo is to try and take some reasonable photo's.
I checked the weather report yesterday and the forecast was for sun and a pleasant 29Deg C. As I had never been before, and didn't really know how long it would take to even just wander around, I planned on giving myself most of the day. I got there around 11:30am and eventually left just after 4pm.
I could have seen everything in about 3 hours, but I took my time and even went back to a couple of the more interesting exhibits (well, animals I wanted to get more photo's of!)
I chose my 50-200mm Lens for the Zoo, as I knew that I would not get very close. The choice was right, except for 1 shot that I wanted to try at a wider angle.
The challenge of shooting at a Zoo is that in almost all cases there is a barrier between you and the Animals. Some of them were just a short fence that I could easily stand near and look over at the animals.
Other barriers included Glass and Wire mesh cages.
When shooting thru glass, The biggest problem is of course that the glass was a bit dirty and reflected everything! I just had to make sure I was as close as possible to the Glass, pick a spot that looked clean and be a little bit patient to get the shot.
Now when it comes to wire mesh it was a bit hit and miss. Once again, I tried to get fairly close to it wherever possible, and ensured that I was focussed on the Animal and not the cage in front. I only had 1 photo that I kept that had the cage visible between me and the exhibited animal as the mesh was very thick and the holes were fairly small.
A couple of Animals I shot you cannot even see the wire mesh in - and that was the Lions and the African Hunting Dogs. I just had to ensure I was close, and that I did not have the wires crossing in the centre of the lens. In fact, you can't even tell there is a wire between me and the Lions.
Now, when it came to setting up the Camera, I shot as I most often do in Aperture Priority. I set the DOF to be fairly shallow on most shots to Isolate the animal as much as possible and still have most of it in focus. I tried to minimise the amount of fences and other such objects behind the Animals - Overall, I managed to minimise or completely remove nearly all fences and obvious man-made structures in the backgrounds.
As I was shooting with a long zoom handheld, I needed to keep the shutter speed up around the 1/400sec (when shooting @200mm) to avoid camera shake. In order to do this, I varied between 100and up to 400 ISO.
I ended up taking around 160 photos and had a fairly high success rate. I put the best 61 into a Gallery
Of course, I do have some favourite photos from today, and I will post them to my photoblog in the coming days.
