Visit to the Zoo (About Photography)
Posted: Fri Sep 03, 2010 4:20 pm
Went to a local wild animal park on Wednesday hoping to get some good animal shots. Well, the whole park was inundated with wasps so it was not a very comfortable experience, and Mrs G got stung. 
We did the 1 hour African Experience in the back of an old army Bedford travelling slowly around ‘the plains’ with many free ranging groups of African Plain animals, except predators of course. They were secure in caged enclosures.
This was at Port Lympne, one of two parks in South Kent operated by the Aspinall Foundation. The foundation is a charity with defined aims of breeding endangered species and putting them back into their natural habitat. Personally, I DO find all the conservation efforts futile. Vast sums of money are invested in repatriating a few animals whose chances of long term survival are very low. I have to ask why has a species declined in the first place and is putting a few back likely to turn events that caused the decline in the first place? I very much doubt it.
Anyhow, enough of my pessimism. If you Google Aspinallfoundation you can see all the animals that they have, mostly in breeding programmes.
I went home with only about 70 shots, mostly boring pictures of grazing animals and well over half of those I binned. I have picked out these three as examples for photography discussion.
As I said, the predatory animals were caged with substantial steel fencing with approx 6cm square mesh. Always difficult but if you use a long lens, set to aperture priority with a large aperture, focus manually and stand a couple of metres from the fence (you can’t get closer due to a second boundary) you do have a chance of getting a reasonable shot of a head. In this example the steel fence can be seen blue/grey and very OOF framing the image. Not the best result but a fair compromise….
When the vehicle stopped by the Grants Zebras they were in a huddle right close to the lorry. I had a long lens on so had to opt for a few head only shots. I did pull in onto one animal and, as I sometimes like to go to extremes, the resulting image would make quite a good poster, I think….
The rhinos were also close by and in a grazing group facing in all directions. By very close cropping I was able to isolate this specimen as if he was all alone.
We did the 1 hour African Experience in the back of an old army Bedford travelling slowly around ‘the plains’ with many free ranging groups of African Plain animals, except predators of course. They were secure in caged enclosures.
This was at Port Lympne, one of two parks in South Kent operated by the Aspinall Foundation. The foundation is a charity with defined aims of breeding endangered species and putting them back into their natural habitat. Personally, I DO find all the conservation efforts futile. Vast sums of money are invested in repatriating a few animals whose chances of long term survival are very low. I have to ask why has a species declined in the first place and is putting a few back likely to turn events that caused the decline in the first place? I very much doubt it.
Anyhow, enough of my pessimism. If you Google Aspinallfoundation you can see all the animals that they have, mostly in breeding programmes.
I went home with only about 70 shots, mostly boring pictures of grazing animals and well over half of those I binned. I have picked out these three as examples for photography discussion.
As I said, the predatory animals were caged with substantial steel fencing with approx 6cm square mesh. Always difficult but if you use a long lens, set to aperture priority with a large aperture, focus manually and stand a couple of metres from the fence (you can’t get closer due to a second boundary) you do have a chance of getting a reasonable shot of a head. In this example the steel fence can be seen blue/grey and very OOF framing the image. Not the best result but a fair compromise….
When the vehicle stopped by the Grants Zebras they were in a huddle right close to the lorry. I had a long lens on so had to opt for a few head only shots. I did pull in onto one animal and, as I sometimes like to go to extremes, the resulting image would make quite a good poster, I think….
The rhinos were also close by and in a grazing group facing in all directions. By very close cropping I was able to isolate this specimen as if he was all alone.
he/she looks quite happy munching away 
