British Wildlife Center: Part 3

This fine Friday finds me on leave, and at the British Wildlife Center (yet again) this time on an organized photo shoot. One of the perks is to be able to enter the enclosures under the supervision of the keepers. There were two groups of 10 people, I think one other grouop may be under the tutorlage of a pro, *I think*. Anyways the ten of us in the n00b group went for the Scottish Wild Cats first, whilst the other groups went to have fun with foxes.

Not much to say except perhaps I shot the most here as usually I had to shoot right the netting, which isn't too bad but the cats are usually far away. This time round, even the 70-200 was a tad too long when the cats came up close for food.

The busy background can be easily put into a nice blur due to how close we are.

After the cats, we took our turn with the foxes.

You can get reasonable shots through the fences on normal days, but getting up close and personal gives a slightly different perspective as well as not really needing to pull out some stupid, long and difficult to use lens.

Depending on where you were in the enclosure, you can get really tight shots with even a short telephoto, so long as you are just by the keeper as he feeds them. I wasn't. :)

Next up we went to the hedgehog area and a snowy owl (that's Hedwig above. No, same species, not the same one in the movie.) and an Eagle Owl. No keepers from the eagle owl :(

The next critter was the hedgehogs. Two of the spiny furballs were brought out, but only the smaller one pictured above bothered to uncurl and provide us with photo opportunities.

Now I know I'm with more serious photogs when we all go down to eye level :) I was one of the earlier ones to shoot the hedgehogs, and I knew I got a keeper earlier on so I stopped.

After the spikey shoot, we broke for lunch, wandered around for a bit attempting to get the otter pups - then met at the deer park to get some shots.

Next was the otters, then we broke up and headed for home. But before that, I went over to the water vole's territory to catch this nice froggie :)