King penguin

I know, my blogging is erratic this week- so is the rest of my life. Shorter week, presentation today, my cat getting sick- I feel I am running around in circles and not getting anything achieved. Hoping for Friday and another weekend.

Some people consider photographing animals in zoo, or any other captivity, as something of the lesser quality. I would not necessarily agree. I feel I am somewhere between soccer mom taking pictures of their kids adventures with point-and-shoot and professional photographer with a budget on gear or trips. There are many reasons I will never go to Antarctica. But I will try to take the pest picture of the leopard or a penguin I can. Get my camera close to fence, zoom in to remove distracting background elements and give my image a more natural scenery feel. Because of how animal areas are organized, I cannot always change the angle and position to get rid of particularly offensive plastic bowl, for example.

This image of king penguins is the best choice of the few in the collection. The only one without the above mentioned bowl. I love the bright colors on those birds. In their natural habitat, they would be probably black and white birds on white snow, with just those colorful collars. Here, all i could do is slightly desaturate the rocks so they do not draw too much attention to themselves.

How about you? Do you like to photograph animals in zoos? Do you prefer to do it in nature?