Leave me alone!

 

Well, this explains my difficulty in deciding whether these birds are rainbow or coconut lorikeets. (Columbus Zoo)

Soras swim but don't have webbed feet. (Columbus Zoo)

Maybe the sora's long toes help it swim. The bird is about the size of a robin.

hadada ibises (Columbus Zoo)

dromedary camels (Columbus Zoo)

More of Poor Clyde, an African gray parrot

Amur tigers (Columbus Zoo)

pygmy goats (Columbus Zoo)

June 11, Columbus Zoo

I spent some time at the Columbus Zoo June 11th. That was before the zoo officially opened to members, but this was one of two "volunteers and families" days, and I have a relative who is a newly-qualified docent.

red-legged seriema, about two feet tall

The hyenas were eating, and we could hear them crunching their bones.

spotted hyena

reticulated giraffe

Masai giraffe

There are two baby vervet monkeys. The troop came out of the chute from their building with babies hanging under their moms.

vervet monkeys

Mmm. Grape stems!

wood thrush

Burmese (brown) mountain tortoise. The scales on the front leg look like that pine cone, no?

Amur tiger

Minnesota Zoo

In December I was able to add the Minnesota Zoo to the short list of zoos I've visited while carrying a camera. The entrance is indoors, so I stayed indoors for seal training and a visit to the unexpectedly large tropical building. I was most interested in the cold-weather animals, but the camera's lens would fog if I'd gone from outside to the tropics.

I had only two hours but went to the monk seal training because it began five minutes after I arrived. It was interesting enough, but I should have skipped it. I couldn't bring myself to sail through the tropical building, so I didn't have as much time outside as I intended. In other words, I didn't focus on my goal 😐

moose

Asian wild (Przewalski’s) horse

Sadie, one of three brown bears, seemed to be snoozing until a keeper arrived. He gave me a heads-up before he called to her, and I caught her just after she looked up. (Dang smudged glass.)

brown bear

An Amur tiger was walking along a fence, apparently following a keeper who was outside. The tiger stopped, but the keeper continued to the tiger building and then called the tiger. The tiger ran around the viewing deck toward the building, and I caught it heading down the slope. (I should've applied a little more exposure compensation to brighten the tiger.)

Amur tiger

Sichuan takin

fisher

bactrian camels

coyote

Two pumas share a rocky exhibit and there was quite a bit of climbing and chasing. (Crummy focus but great action.)

puma (cougar)

The adult lynx posed nicely. There was also at least one juvenile in the exhibit.

Canada lynx

Stick it out

Is it rude if an animal sticks out its tongue? All pictures are from the Columbus Zoo except as noted.

cheetah

 

Amur tiger

African lion

scrub python

Aldabra tortoise

reticulated giraffe

Ojibwe, a moose

great black-backed gull (Toledo Zoo)

In the snow, redux

I'm not happy with my photos of animals in the snow (previous post) because they look flat and dull. So, contrary to my conscience, I fired-up PaintShop Pro. I took the easy route and used the One Step Photo Fix feature. I thought that feature went too far, so I used Smart Photo Fix, which let me make some adjustments manually. Here's what I got for the tiger:

Amur tiger, with (bottom) and without digital enhancement

I prefer the slightly-increased brightness of the enhanced tiger.

Do you see the dividing line in the wolverine photo? Interestingly, the Photo Fix features make dark areas darker in addition to brightening the scene overall. 

Wolverine, with the left half enhanced

I prefer the left half, I think.

On the other hand, I like the unenhanced pronghorn photo because it looks colder. Here's a poor pronghorn, trudging through the snow in search of food or shelter. Will it survive?! Of course it will. It's in a zoo, and there's a shed about 100 feet to the left. Also, it was about 34℉, not 9℉ as I write this.

pronghorn

Have I changed my tune about enhancing photos in software? Not really, if only because it takes a lot of time. I'd rather spend time continuing to learn how to use my camera than learning how to use PaintShop Pro. I could push the One Step Photo Fix button for every photo, but where's the creativity in that?

My understanding of a camera's auto-exposure function is that shooting a snowy scene often yields a picture that is underexposed (too dark) because the camera adjusts for the brightness of the snow to the detriment of the relative darkness of the subject. Reading and backyard experiments tell me I can use my camera's exposure compensation button to get brighter subjects right from the camera. This is a good, small step away from my using auto-everything and toward taking control of the camera.

In the snow

Columbus had a little snow recently, so I went to the zoo Monday to check out the animals I thought would be out. None of these photos would win a prize, but I enjoyed the trip.

pronghorn

Lee, a polar bear. He's brown because of fun in a mulch pile.

A wolverine was quite active when I was there.

A bald eagle, with another in the background

Hermie, a bison

Hermie and the zoo's water tower

Amur (Siberian) tiger

Death of a Camera

I went to the Columbus Zoo October 9th, carrying both the Nikon D50 and Kodak Z1012. The Kodak takes fine pictures, but the Nikon SLR, which is older (~2006 vs. 2008), is a pleasure to use. The viewfinder is bright; manual zoom is easy; autofocus is fast; the shutter delay is brief; and the camera is quickly ready to take another picture. The Kodak is smaller and lighter; has twice as many pixels; and has a longer zoom, but the motorized zoom control is placed awkwardly on the back of the camera and it seems as though a minute passes before it's ready to take another shot.

I sometimes carry both cameras because of the Nikon's ease of use and the Kodak's ability to seemingly capture more detail.

Anyway, my first stop was the barn and goat yard. I took a couple of pictures with the Nikon, looked at them, and was surprised that they were all black. Lens cap on? No, there isn't one. A leftover manual setting from a previous trip? Hmm. I made sure the camera was set to automatic and took more shots, with the same result. Battery? I knew it was getting low, but it wasn't dead. Still, I decided the battery was the cause of the all-black images and put the Nikon back in the bag.

Here are some shots from that day:

Merten's water monitor

hadada ibis

Amur tiger

Asian elephant

At home I charged the battery and took a trip to the zoo the next week. The same thing happened, which was not good. What had I done? I fiddled around to no avail and pulled out the Kodak. I took two pictures before the camera shut down. I was ready for that and had a second battery... but I'd left it in the car. I called the trip a complete bust and went home.

I searched the Internet for causes of black pictures and followed some diagnostic steps. I concluded that the shutter works but the light/image sensor does not. What next?

The Nikon is not my camera; it's by brother-in-law's. He loaned it to me earlier this year as I was deciding how to replace the Kodak, which has failing buttons and controls. I had settled on a Canon in the same "advanced point-and-shoot" category as the Kodak when my brother-in-law told me the Nikon was mine as a long-term loan. Wow!

I had been secretly wishing for a better SLR, one with more pixels and better low-light performance, but SLRs cost a lot. (My reading tells me a camera's megapixels is less important than the size of the image sensor, but the D50 has only 6 megapixels vs. 12 for the Kodak.) Now that the D50 didn't work, I had an excuse to replace it with something better! My Internet searching for causes of black images also pointed me to the possibility of buying a used SLR, and that's what I did. My Nikon D7000, first produced in 2010, arrived this week, and I told my brother-in-law that I upgraded his camera.