I spent yesterday morning in Dublin Zoo as part of an outing organized by Dublin Camera Club. The rain held off, and we had access to the zoo an hour before it opened to the public, so it was a good opportunity to get some shots of the animals. Between the Kilmainham Gaol project (which I’ll blog more about later this week) and yesterday’s outing to the zoo, there’s something that seems to draw the camera club to photograph places where life is held in captivity.
This photograph isn’t my favourite of the trip, but it’s title is one of the title’s for an image that I’m proudest of. If you’re not a Father Ted fan, it might be lost on you. If that’s the case do a search on YouTube for “small far away” and you should get the reference.
Putting titles on images can be a necessary evil if you’re entering photographs in competition or putting them into an exhibition. Sometimes a photograph will speak for itself, but there can be times when a title adds context to an image and perhaps helps the viewer understand what they are looking at. I can think of two images that I’ve posted (here and here) that this was true for. For this blog, I usually try to title posts to relate to the image, rather than the content that I’m going to discuss, even though sometimes it might be easier to refer to the content in the title.
A good title should probably be succinct, and ideally might add another dimension to an image in what it conveys to the viewer. I had reason to consider this for the upcoming exhibition of photographs for Kilmainham – for the exhibition programme all images will be referenced by number but we can title them if we wish. I’ve submitted suggestions for my images, but I suspect there will others who end up with images titled as “Untitled”. I think this may work for abstract images where you may not want to give the viewer any clues as to what they are looking at and let them draw their own conclusions, but if the photo is quite obviously of, say, a cell in Kilmainham, then I reckon that “Gaol cell, Kilmainham” is at least a marginal improvement.
The title I chose here is of course a reference to the mallard in the foreground and the white rhinocerous in the background. Given that just a couple of weeks ago a white rhino (possibly this one in fact), killed a zebra in an accident in the zoo when he ran into it, the mallard was being quite brave standing even that close. I got up close to two of these rhinos myself when they came right over to the boundary fence allowing me take some nice detail photos of their eyes and feet. They’ll be part of a slideshow of images from the zoo that I am posting tomorrow so come back to check that out.
PS: the technical detail hides the mallard in this photo if I post it in its usual place, so here it is instead: f/3.5 @ 1/500s, ISO 800, 50-150mm lens at 102mm, Nikon D300.
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