This is a serval at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo. Handlers had it out on a leash exploring part of the zoo. They will use the animals in shows and educational programs, and I presume the walk aimed to get the animal used to the leash, and to having people around. These cats live wild in Africa, and they can leap 15 feet in the air to snag an unsuspecting bird.
This one appears to have a potential meal in sight. Shot taken with a Canon 7D Mark II with an EF 200-400mm f/4 USM lens.
This is Lucy, a Florida panther at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo. She was found abandoned as a cub and raised in captivity. She will talk to you, almost like a chirp. And when you are lucky, she will sit still long enough for you to get a good shot. Taken with a Canon 7D Mark II and 300mm f/2.8 lens.
The kitten has stayed a week now and seems to like everything about his new home except for having his claws trimmed. He tolerated it well the first time, but not as much today. I waver on whether to keep him, but need to decide and act fast. It will be much easier to find him another home when he's in this adorable kitten phase. He really is a joyous ball of purring fun.
Saturday morning I sit on the couch when I hear a high-pitched cat scream coming from near the front door outside my house. I walk out to check on it, and I see this guy.
Photo taken with a Sony A77 with an 85mm f/1.4 prime lens.
So now I have a new feline roommate, which the incumbent feline roommates hate. He did not have a microchip, and has not been neutered, but he's people-friendly and barely fussed when I trimmed his claws.
Is it horsejumping or horse jumping? I should have Googled that before I wrote this. Anyway. I wanted a way to add photos here without the effort of re-sizing them for the blog and just discovered that I can embed images that I share on Instagram.
This means more photos here. And, thanks to my job now, I often get to shoot with a variety of cameras.
Right now we have a series of videos to produce for Canon about its cameras, including its flagship DSLR, the Canon EOS 1D X. We went to Copper Creek Ranch in Tampa to shoot a horse jumping obstacles to demonstrate the camera's fast focus ability and burst shooting.
Most mornings when I get to work, I see this cat. Lawrence, the company's maintenance man, feeds her, as does at least one other person from another company in the building next door. Lawrence told me this morning that the cat was here when the company moved into the building 12 years ago.
That is an incredibly long time for a cat to live outside on its own. Most outdoor cats in the "wild" do not last five years.
She doesn't let me get close to her, but a 500mm lens helped me get some
shots that appear relatively close. The shot above I took Monday.
Yesterday, she let me venture closer to her, and I caught some shafts of
early morning sunlight as I took more shots.
Sign of the times. Five-dollar day at Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo costs $6 now. I have less luck each time I go shoot at the zoo.
Some of the exhibits aren't as good as they once were. Some of the animals stayed either out of sight or at least out of shooting range to avoid the sun. And, finally, I had trouble with my camera not liking the new SD card, and I was stupid enough not to have brought a backup (Yeah, lesson learned!).
So I got only a few decent shots. These are not cropped, thanks to the joy of a 500mm lens.
With due respect to Jimmy Buffet fans, the title refers to actual birds.
I shoot too infrequently, which I realize is how I preface all my entries now, but I did pull the camera out last week to shoot some birds (as opposed to "flip some birds") at Sarasota Jungle Gardens. Most of these are not cropped much, if any. If you shoot wider, shots reveal that the birds are captives at some kind of attraction. I want you to see the birds, not their artificial setting.
Sunday I braved the throngs that converge on Lowry Park Zoo every time it has a $5 admission day. Regular price is $20.95. I shot 785 photos and it took until now to find enough to make a slide show.
I'm not blaming the new camera, a Sony A550, for this. I need to read the directions to see if I'm doing something to cause too many of the images to appear washed out. I do like that whenever you press a button on the camera, the LCD screen shows a description of its function.
One thing I stumbled across was something called the smart teleconverter. A teleconverter is an attachment that increases how far your lens can zoom. Most come in magnifications of 1.4 or 2X. The A550 has an electronic one built in. I thought it might work like a digital zoom you find on many point-and-shoot cameras. Instead, it simply crops the image in the camera and you end up with a smaller image.
I took the shots of the eagle with the in-camera teleconverter.
I shot at Tampa's zoo Friday, lugging my tripod around so that I could get sharper photos taken with my long lens, including its extender that makes it reach the equivalent of 400mm. The problem is that the extender renders auto focus useless so I have to hope the animals will pose for me long enough to focus on them.
Sometimes they did.
Yes, you saw that right. The two gray monkeys had just completed "the deed" and the male had his, ah, extender still deployed. I noticed them going at it thinking, "are they doing what I think they're doing?" By the time I thought to take a shot, they had finished.
Here are some portrait shots. Don't worry. No monkey porn.
When I play golf, often the only good shots I make are with my camera. I've made it a habit to bring it with me when I play. Warmer weather brought out the alligators that decorate the course's ponds.
A 300mm lens let me get that close. I got within about six feet of it.
More temperate temperatures also brought one of the residents of the housing development that surrounds the course out with his two-month old puppy. The sun was behind the pup and the shutter noise startled it and, short on time before we had to go play the next hole, I didn't take the time to compensate for the lighting issue properly. But I think the cuteness comes through.
A little post production to brighten up the area around her eyes would help. That thing was the cutest little puppy dog maybe ever.
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.
And a gator who was kind enough to pose for me near the 11th tee. These shots are minimally cropped, though I had a 300mm lens that helped me get close.
I even had a birdie using my golf clubs. How about that?
It was $5 day at Lowry Park Zoo but temperatures in the 30s (yes, Fahrenheit!) kept the usually massive crowds away despite the discounted price. I went with several other brave (? -- you may have another adjective in mind) members of the Brandon-Riverview Photography Group.
Some of the animals were out but many had more sense than we did. I had my 2x magnifying extender on, which means that I had to manually focus all of the shots while wearing two gloves on my left hand because auto focus doesn't work with my extender. Photo below by Roger Moran.
That's not to make excuses for the lack of brilliance. Just sayin'.
I also think that I need to quit being lazy and use my tripod to get better focus on some of my shots. Handheld is adequate for posting on a blog but for print quality photos, I need to take the time to set the camera on something solid.
