After some time taking care of other stuff its time to start writing again.
In assignment 3 I charged myself to go to the zoo and learn something about taking photographs of animals. On a saturday evening I set out and went to Beekse Bergen. The zoo is a safari zoo, meaning that the selection of animals is a lot smaller but the living space is a lot bigger.
Sharpness:
One of the biggest problems I found was to get the images sharp. The animals move but also if they don’t it is hard to get the right part in focus (the eyes)
Fence:
A defining property of a zoo is that the inhabitant are in cages or enclosed by fences. This makes photographing a little tricky especially because often there is still a distance between the fence and the zoo visitor (a moot or something like that). I found however that you can take pictures through a fence without problems. Since the fence is so much out of focus it won’t show up on your picture as such (you do see a distortion in the boekeh) The picture below is taken through a fence. The holes in the green fence were diamond shaped about 1.5 cm wide and I was about a meter from the fence.
Plexiglass:
I also took some pictures through plexiglass but those didn’t work out. The plexiglass was very dirty for all the kids touching it and those viewpoint were also very busy with people.
Bird show:
The zoo I visited held a bird show where they show a number of birds of prey. This gave a good opportunity to try to make pictures of flying birds. I found that my auto focus was not fast enough so what I did was focus on places close to where the bird was going to land or take off. I took many picture only a few where close to be correctly focused, so I still need more practice.
Taking photos of animals is great to do, but not easy. A zoo is a great way to practice and I will recommend doing it if you want to take pictures of aimals in the wild.
Happy shooting!
