Portraits

 We awoke to heavy clouds and wet streets.  It seemed a perfect day to visit the Rio Grande Zoo with my Spotmatic and the 75-230mm Yashinon zoom.  The big old lens retains good sharpness even wide-open, but the lens' f/4.5 aperture and the not-too-bright screen of the SP makes finding the perfect focus point a challenge.  With the zoo animals always in motion, one is never sure if the decisive moment made it onto the film.  At the end of my visit I was really uncertain what my scans would reveal.  As I pulled out of the zoo's parking lot in my truck I switched on the radio, and there was Dave Brubeck playing Take Five !  I took it as a good omen.

Complaint

Pretender

Snack

Bird Watching

The cheetah insisted on color, so I switched to my little Lumix digital and posted the results on my other blog.

Wildlife photography really demands a good digital camera.  Even confined in the zoo, the subjects are always in motion.  Fast focus, auto-exposure, quick cycling, burst shooting and unlimited capacity greatly enhance the chances of catching the moments you want.  I'm thinking it is time I sell some of my little-used film cameras and invest in a digital to shoot at the zoo. (Also, the price of color film has gone way beyond what I am willing to pay.)

Zoom at the Zoo

I have made pictures I like at the zoo with quite a variety of old film cameras.  In terms of productivity, the champ is my Pentax SP with the Yashica Auto Yashinon Zoom 1:4.5 f=75mm~230mm.  I've used the big old zoom for little else, but at the zoo where the subject distance is largely under control of the animals the zoom gets me the tight compositions that I am looking for.   The maximum 4.5 aperture provides a slightly dim image in the viewfinder; that, along with the limited depth of field at 230mm, makes focusing on moving targets challenging.  However, with proper focus and an adequate shutter speed the resolution of the lens leaves little to complain about.

Savannah Dreams

Matilda will be a year old on July 20th.

* * *

The Wikipedia page on the Hippo is worth a look:

... After the elephant and rhinoceros, the hippopotamus is the third-largest land mammal and is the heaviest extant land artiodactyl. Despite their physical resemblance to pigs and other terrestrial even-toed ungulates, the closest living relatives of the Hippopotamidae are cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises, etc.), from which they diverged about 55 million years ago ...

Early Morning Walk

We went to the Los Poblanos Open Space this morning to see the Sandhill Cranes.

There is a cold front moving into New Mexico this weekend, so I expect it will bring along more birds.  I may try a 2x and 3x telextender with the Zoom to see if I can pick up a bit more detail that way.  Focusing is a challenge, though, as the Pentax has a rather dull screen and the depth of field is very narrow.

b/w zoo

quiet time

Hardly anyone but me at the zoo yesterday, all the kids having returned to school.  I couldn't find many animals that weren't dozing in the shade.