Lowry Park Zoo Photos

Cold weather that kept the expected crowds away from Lowry Park Zoo's $5 admission day last month prompted the zoo to have another one yesterday.

That one started out cold, too, with temps in the lower 40s at the outset but it warmed up enough by early afternoon that I could shed my winter coat. The zoo didn't draw the 9,000 people it gets on discount days in May and September but crowds were much heavier than they were when only 3,000 braved the blustery day last month.

More animals were out, too, though I didn't see much of the white tigers on several passes by their enclosure. I've visited the zoo often enough that when I go now, I target specific animals to photograph — primates, big cats and the lorikeets are my favorites, as you can see in the slide show. I also visited the bald eagles a couple of times.

Though I want to improve my technique, the main reason I shoot is to make photographs I want to look at later. I don't want to look at hippos or rhinocerouses so I don't shoot them unless I notice something unusual that interests me.

I shot about half of the 344 photos I took with an old consumer-grade 75-300mm Minolta lens. For the rest I used my Sony f/2.8 70-200mm lens with a 2X teleconverter, which gave me a 400mm zoom range. Unfortunately, the teleconverter renders auto focus useless on my camera. It also seems to affect the quality of the images enough to negate shooting with a $2,000 lens.

Either way, I wasn't aiming to shoot landscape panoramas. I was trying to get in tight and though many of the shots are cropped somewhat, I did get really close up shots.

I also lugged my tripod around with me but set it up only once, to shoot a bald eagle. The other places it simply wasn't practical to use, and it would be even more difficult to set up in bigger crowds. Sony's anti-shake function works well and kept most of my hand-held shots in focus, particularly those I took with the Minolta lens.