Location Taken: National Zoo, Washington DC
Time Taken: March 2010
Do you know how challenging it can be to take good photos of zoo animals? Especially if you’re just a visitor to the zoo and not an official photographer who can actually get in closer and everything.
For one thing, you’re dealing with animals, and they don’t always act the way you’d want them to. Like this cheetah. It was pacing around in the back of its pen, usually at a bad angle to me. It wasn’t even too interested in the zebra in the adjacent pen, despite the angles I got in this photo.
Oh, if you didn’t spot the zebra, it’s along the upper left edge of this photo. I didn’t see it in the thumbnail version when I was picking this photo, and just noticed it was there when I opened it up full-size.
That’s another good point, actually. A lot of animals have natural camouflage to help keep them from, say, getting eaten by a cheetah. Which means that they blend in to the background quite well. Which is not at all helpful for getting nicely dynamic photos. Especially if you’re like me and only go to the zoo on cloudy and rainy days to avoid having to take photos of the massive crowds surrounding the pens.
And the pens themselves don’t help the zoo visitor photographer. Now, they’re very nice pens. We’ve come a long way from bare floors and small cages. There’s plenty of places for the animals to explore and hide and do whatever their little animal hearts (or big animal hearts, in the elephant’s case) desire. But there’s only so many ways to disguise a fence, especially if you still want to let people see the animals on the other side. So well, that means a lot of my zoo photos have fences in them. Which kinda make it all too obvious that this is a zoo animal, which cuts out the “unseen nature” appeal that a lot of animal photography has.
We suburban Americans really don’t encounter too many animals in our lives, after all. We’ve kind of cordoned ourselves off from them. And a lot of them it really isn’t good to approach too closely, both for our safety and theirs. So photography is one of the few ways to help remind us that there are large areas of the world where that’s not the case, where hippos rule the rivers or polar bears roam the streets.
Of course, even in zoos you can’t get too close to the animals. There’s a lot of safety barriers, and only a few of the animals hang out right by the visitor’s side of the pen. They’re more likely to be by the access points for the zoo workers, you know, the ones who feed them. So just about all of my photos have this same angle to them. And my zoom only goes so far. I only got close ups of the birds and the like that have smaller pens or (in some ducky cases) no pens.
Ah well, it’s still pretty awesome to see the animals at the zoo.
