ZSL part two

My original plan this weekend was to head down over the Goodwood Revival to check out the old 1950s cars - however due to certain circumstances, that didn't happen. Decided to pop over to the London Zoo instead to check out what's happening. The Griffin Vulture above was my first keeper of the day, the whole bunch was out sunning their wings, this one happened to turn around.

One of the denizens I missed last time round, Raja the Komodo Dragon. You gotta admit it's posing really nice on it's pseudo meal.

Checked out the Emus and Wallabies, I think I've got sufficient from Oz, so I head out to visit Africa. The Okapi was grazing pretty far in the distance, this time it was up close, so I decided to go for an abstract of its fur pattern.

Rounding the other side of Africa, we get to the Otter and Lemur enclosures. Otters were snoozing, and the Lemurs were being fed by a tour group (lucky people!). The lemur enclosure is covered by a really fine wire mesh, it's still fine to shoot through, just watch your exposure.

Just beside the lemurs would be the Clore Rainforest Lookout experience. This is probably my favourite exhibit to shoot at as there is nothing blocking your view. However, with every plus comes a minus - the lighting here is very diffused, which while very good will force you to pull out longish exposures or upping your iso. Most of the time here, I would be ranging between 800 to 1600.

We get the playful Golden Headed Lion Tamarins and Titi Monkies filling out most of the adventure, with two sloths, a pair of Sunbiterns providing more entertainment. The bottom of the place is the playground of some Trumpeteers, and some sort of mice.

Don't think I got good shots of the sloth, but today I managed a few and got a good closeup of its "toes".

This picture above is higher res, so do click on it. One denizen I did not manage to get a photo off was the Southern Tamandua - a kind of Anteater. I was observing the sloths being fed when I noticed a muzzle appear from one of the nest boxes. The first though that ran through my mind was - was that a Coati?! A while later I quizzed the extremely friendly staff there, and it seems they only appear once a day - at lunchtime which is 2.30pm - and nap the rest of the time! No pic as I was behind a whole group of tourists, and by the time I got a space, Mr Anteater is probably having dreams of termite decimation.

The lions have recently have cubs, however I had no luck getting a natural shot of them, so the best I could do was just observe. Finally, I got around to the Gorilla enclosure.

I'm not a fan of shooting primates. They are just so human like, it's like doing street photography.

Shooting the gorillas also pose some difficulty for me in terms of exposure. AE modes seemed to be underexposing the gorillas, and putting them into the shadow region, hence noise and thus loss of detail.

The quick solution I came up was to spot meter the gorilla and expose for the blacks as mid tones, and hope that the surrounding mid tones could be brought back down in post, and also that the highlights won't be burnt out. AE locking would be annoying, so I switched over to manual exposure.

In any case, the few gorillas shots above were probably mostly the D300 + 300/4 + TC14EII, giving me roughly the same field of view as a 630mm lens. The overcast conditions, while nice for lowing the dynamic range was forcing me to use between 800 to 1600 iso. Gah. I'll probably ask on photo.net forums how people meter gorillas, and other darker critters, as I'm also having issues with badgers.

Sun was also starting to go down about 4.50pm, very evident when observing the light meter in manual mode :) Past 5 I wasn't too keen to shoot anymore as the light levels were getting a tad low. Oh winter, how I love and hate thee.