The itchy trigger finger needed some medicine, so I thought I'd drop down to Shepreth Wildlife Park again to get some much needed healing time. Went with some photogs this time, and did NOT just bring my 70-300VR :P
I think Winter is a fairly tough time to go shooting critters. Not only is the weather always threatening to pour, it is *cold*. Light in broad daylight is also pretty dim, most of the day I was averaging 1600 iso, wide open on my 300/4, though with the 70-200, I could drop down to about 800-1000, but still the conditions there weren't always conducive to shooting with the shorter lens. Come on Nikon, 300/2.8VR DX please.....
For most of the day, I was actually staying with the tigers. It's tough to get a nice environment shot free of the fencing, so I focused more on abstracts and portraits.
This full face shot above has some technical issues - mainly shooting through the fencing at close range caused some horrible loss of contrast. Much tweaking to get a color version was to no avil, but a B&W conversion seemed to work.
This is a crop (maybe 30%) into the frame; the female was lying around by a set of two fences, so anything shot with a shorter lens will be all fencing. The 300/4 + 1.4xTC and some luck allowed a shot through both sets of fences, but I still captured some of it, hence the crop.
There is a new meerkat exhibit (good lord why are meerkats in almost every zoo?!) - but what's even better is the new food/play area - lots of space, and more choices of food :)
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