As promised yesterday, today I’m posting a slideshow of images taken in Dublin Zoo on Saturday morning. The slideshow includes a couple of my favourites from my last visit to the zoo also, but is predominantly new images from Saturday’s trip. Click on the photo above to view it.
Getting access to the zoo before it opened allowed me to get up close to the tigers, the sea lions and this beautiful lioness, who was a very cooperative model. Having come right up to the glass to “say hello”, she returned to her shelter at the back of the enclosure, took up a graceful pose, and made eye contact with the camera.
The tigers were almost cooperative too, as you will see from the last photograph in the slideshow. I used a fisheye lens and had it pressed up against the glass between me and one of the tigers and he decided to take a closer look, leaving me with a very close-up shot of his nose. Sadly the camera didn’t focus fast enough, but I’ve left the shot in the selection as it’s not often you get what is effectively a macro shot of a tigers nose.
The sea lions didn’t like my camera so much. It probably didn’t help that I was photographing them just before feeding time, or that I had my camera on it’s monopod elevated right in over their pool, about 6 feet above the water, again with a fisheye lens, and with the self timer set to 10 seconds in the hope of getting a photo as they swam by below. It took a few goes to get the timing right, and I was concentrating on this so much that I didn’t notice the bull approaching in the water in front of me. When he jumped out of the water about 4 feet in front of me, and about 2 feet from my camera, I certainly did notice him, and almost dropped the monopod in the process. It gave some of my fellow photographers a good laugh, and suggested to me I should keep the camera a little further away from the animals – at least until they had been fed.
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