Yesterday it was a glorious morning and on the way to preschool Young Indiana said to me, “We should go to the zoo after school on this beautiful day!”
That seemed like a very sensible thing to do, so after school I collected him and we hopped on the bus to, er, actually, to go downtown and then get on the bus to the zoo, because that was by far the easiest way to get there, but, y’know, details details. To go to the zoo. :)
It was in fact a perfectly marvelous day, and I learned something very important, which is that I should not wear my big fashionable vision-correcting sunglasses when shooting with my non-autofocus telephoto lens, because it turns out three quarters of the pictures I take will have the fence behind the animal, or nothing at all, in nice sharp focus. It must have something to do with the distance of the glasses lens from my eye, because usually only about a quarter of my non-autofocus pictures are out of focus. :)
I did, however, get some nice pictures, and am especially pleased with my Babushka gorilla shot. Babushka gorilla
There’s also a new baby bongo! I love the bongos. Sadly I missed the picture of Daddy Bongo looking like he might charge all of us humans who were looking at his baby (wretched lack of autofocus!), but I got the baby looking pretty belligerent itself, so that works for me. :) Baby Bongo
Just as I was taking this picture of one of the newish redheaded monkeys at the zoo, the baby next to me SQUEALED!, causing the monkey to look sharply in our direction. I said thank you to the baby. :) Redheaded Monkey
I think this is the best picture I’ve managed to take of the white-crowned mangabeys. They move fast! White-Crowned Mangabeys
And since it was his idea to go to the zoo, I figure Young Indiana should feature in today’s post. :) Enthusiastic Primate
Hippos are not especially easy creatures to take a cool picture of. They tend too much to looking like giant blobs, whether in the water or out. But I rather liked this one, albeit with a gladness that I was not anywhere near where she could suddenly lunge out of the water and lumber toward me… :)
I gave several people copies of the calendar for Christmas. Upon seeing this picture, there were gasps of, “How close did you have to get for this picture?!” I was really about three feet away, probably; the tiger was obligingly lying near the glass of its enclosure, and I had a good lens on the camera. :)
Mara These lovely little creatures are basically giant South American guinea pigs, although they look more like rabbits crossed with antelope. Dublin Zoo and Fota Island, where this was taken, has quite a few of them, and at Fota they’re totally free-range. They’re very very shy and charming, and I spent a lot of time at Fota sneaking up on them to take pictures. More pictures than might be strictly necessary, really. I have a lot of mara pics. :)
