melbourne zoo expedition
Today Paige & I headed to Melbourne zoo to take some photographs & have some girl time. With my dads tomtom directing us, me driving, we arrived at 12.10pm. When leaving my house the weather although meant to be “25 degrees” seemed very grey & cloudy; but upon arriving to the zoo car park, the sun started to shine & the clouds cleared for what would turn out to be the perfect weather day, for outside photography.
We made our way around the zoo taking in all the attractions, giggling over some cute animals & good photographs. I think we left the zoo around 4.30pm, so quite a tiring day of walking. It’s a really nice change to have a girlfriend who I share a common passion with, someone who I can have adventures with & can talk photography with & someone who won’t bail out of everything planned. Paige, I know you read my blog; I had a really great day with you today & I am already looking forward to our next adventure, great ocean road like you suggested really sounds good. : )
These are the photographs from today’s adventure.
“peek a boo”
my favourite zoo animal to visit & watch
the retile photographs are looking through glass;
I love the depth of field in this & his beady eye
too cute for words, really;
she sat there looking at everyone looking at her & placed her hand on the window, when a little girl put her hand on the other side;
he/she was showing off, playing with the water;
butterfly house; humid, humid, arh humid.
you’d be this sad to if you were caged;
australian natives;
i did E at raves to get high and enjoy myself to the max lol. i never really experienced my social anxiety at raves. just now because im cleaning up my act…partying much less…TRYING REAL HARD not to do drugs. my psychiatrist told me its a very common side effect that a lot of ppl getting clean from cocaine experience afterwards or during. ya i would definitely not spend 3gs on a camera, although the SLR sounds sooo appealing i think id for sure get a camera with that. u did a good job at explaining depth of field. that shoulda been a gimme,but im recovering from 4 days straight of partying pretty hard=z. oh man i really want that dog…the name oh man that could tongue twister for sure. AND, FINALLY you have pictures of monkeys and gorillas for me=] i have a new post up. i promised myself id be writing more this week and playing less poker!
freshtodeath
Monday, January 12, 2009 at 8:23 am
what’s a tomtom?
the picture of the fence, two lions, and the first two shots of the black monkey are all extremely intriguing! i might adjust my banner and add in one of those monkeys=]
freshtodeath
Monday, January 12, 2009 at 8:28 am
oh yeah…i wish i had a friend who loved photography. i guess im going to have to start making new friends with very strict standards. i just want 1 friend who shares the same passion as you do, luckily!
freshtodeath
Monday, January 12, 2009 at 8:29 am
First off… “Running Thoughts” was amazing. It seems that I did open your eyes to something about being in tune with your star player. You can’t live your life being a “People pleaser”. I have a hard time with that as well. 2nd… I’m so glad to see that you are getting use out of your new camera. I LOVE ANIMALS! Especially big cats like lions and tigers! 3rd… didn’t know if I should leave you comments here with everything going on in your life so I just sent them to your email. I have my wordpress set up to send every comment I get to my email and that’s where I check 1st. I hope everything is going well for you! Take care Sweetie….
Shady
Monday, January 12, 2009 at 3:13 pm
I absolutely love the shot of the little turtle poking up through the water! The lazy lions photo is quite nice as well. I would suggest you host your photos at flickr like I do for my blog so people can also comment on each individual one, just an idea. :)
Andrew
Monday, January 12, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Hi! Chloe , Thank you for wishing me. And yes lovely photography :)
dinesh
Monday, January 12, 2009 at 9:57 pm
wow, these are really wonderful. the first 3 or 4 after your description of ‘too cute…’ all look as if they’re contemplating they’re existence in some way. you say cute, i say bittersweet…and the turtle photo is sublime.
nickjkirincic
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 12:20 am
great pictures.
SJ
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 6:27 am
There are some brilliant shots here. Nice job getting the eyes, too. It’s probably the most important and at the same time the most overlooked aspect of wildlife photography. These make me want to go shoot at a zoo. Unfortunately, I won’t be near one again until May, but on the other hand, it will probably be a little warmer than twenty-one degrees then.
Most of my black and white is on film (the picture I just uploaded is a fairly rare exception), so I don’t think a new digital body would slow me down too much (although it would probably distract me for a while). Unfortunately, I had no luck trying to sell my equipment locally, so now I need to decide if I want to go the eBay route. It does not look like a fun option.
Between the camera selling crisis, moving back to my apartment at school yesterday and preparing for a new semester, and spending time with people from back at home who I don’t see often, I got a little distracted. Now that I’m back to the regular routine, I hope to post more often.
As for the flash, it depends. If you are in a situation where you need a flash, you’ll find the one on your camera pretty underwhelming pretty quickly (every pop-up flash is like that). When it comes to artificial light, hotshoe strobes are the way to go, and eventually you’ll want to look into off-camera lighting (the Strobist blog, controversial though it may be, presents one inexpensive and straightforward approach that is wildly popular). If you;re trying to get things like the night skyline, though, you won’t want to use a flash at all, just a tripod and longer exposures. What specifically are you looking to shoot?
Anthony
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 6:58 am
Wow, these shots are amazing. I simply adore that picture with the spiderweb strand and the wire (I seem to have an affinity for wires, flies and cutlery :P). The one with the turtle half-submerged is cool and all the ones of the meerkats are so cute, as were the ones of the butterflies, which were amazing. The butterflies look so dainty and fragile :)
Yay, I have finally caught up with all your posts :P. Now to go catch up with all the others. *grins*
cravingoxygen
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 9:08 am
well i had bad problems with cocaine and ecstasy. cocaine is much harder to get clean off of though. like me being my stupid self have done it 3 or 4 times this week, yet before that i hadn’t done it for like 6 or 7 months which is the cleanest ive ever been since i started doing drugs at the age of 14. when i say party hard…i mean party hard too much drinking and yes drugs most of the time :Z tomtom thats cute hahahaah. “unable to forget like a crack fiend’s first hit” this poem was about that ex who i was once in love with..and a crack head never forgets their very first hit because that’s what they’re always chasing. i don’t think its selfish at all bringing up something youve experienced while commenting on someones work so don’t feel guilty!!!!!:P
freshtodeath
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 9:54 am
Ahh, so you want to know the secret?
Well, here goes. This was around 10PM in mid-winter, so it was completely dark. I used two flashes- one was mounted on the camera, which was maybe 20ft from the model and served primarily to trigger the second flash, which was 45 degrees left of the model and about 10 feet away. The off-camera flash had a tiny optical slave attached, which triggered the flash when it recognized another flash. The flash on the camera thus triggered the off-camera flash with its light, and because the off-camera strobe was so much closer (they were roughly the same power), it added significantly more light from its angle. Because a flash happens in less than 1/1000 of a second, shutter speed is irrelevant to a flash exposure. All that matters is the aperture, because in that instant, how wide the aperture is open is the only thing that determines how much light gets in (remember that it was dark, so any extra time the shutter is open after the flash fires lets in almost no light anyway). I took some test shots to find the correct aperture setting (in this case, f/4.5 because the strobes I was using are fairly low output and the camera was far away). This is all that mattered for the exposure of the subject. I then dialed in a nice long shutter so that after the flash perfectly exposed the subject in the instant of the flash’s firing, the extra shutter time (in this case, eight seconds) would allow the background to “burn in” a little bit (there’s always some ambient light). The moving lights were created by a truck that was approaching to the left- the camera was on a tripod, so it would not have blurred any lights with its movement during the eight seconds the shutter was open. The subject stood relatively still, and because she had already been perfectly exposed in the instant of the flash, the comparatively tiny amount of light that made it back from her to the camera in the remaining eight seconds really didn’t make any difference.
I hope this makes some sense, and sheds some light on how I did this. Feel free to ask for more clarification if any of this is confusing.
Anthony
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Wow! Great photos! I love animals, so I hope you continue with this fantastic work :)
José Alberto
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Well Done! I really admire your photos as they are amazing and beautiful. I love animals especially the tigers. The pattern of stripes from the face of the tiger taken in Melbourne Zoo is different from the tiger taken in my country- Malaysia. Our Malayan tigers are different compare to them and I think this is a different species.
I enjoy your photographs and if I have any chance I will not forget to visit this Melbourne Zoo.
visuallens
Thursday, January 15, 2009 at 1:06 pm
I been there and my fave animal is meerkat too! hehe they too cute aren’t they? ;)
amazing shots sweety! I absolutely love the gorilla and the one animal that sleeping :) too cute! can I hug it? :P the butterflies shots simply beautiful!
Tumbleweed
Monday, January 19, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Great photos!
I especially love the meerkats. They’re awesome little creatures.
I recently just purchased my very first SLR camera (a canon 1000D), so it’s very interesting looking through your photography. Some very nice photos :)
Courtney
Courtney
Friday, January 30, 2009 at 4:00 am
I see my buddy knowz what she does! Real Cool Frames. The 17th(Lizard?) one from top seems to be the best. Its through the glass right? hmm n i love butterflies n Tigers! u got the butterflies right. COOL!
but i didnt understand the last photo! LoL!
wildblack
Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 1:49 am
Very nice selections, the butterflys are the best. I may have to look into upgrading from my D80 to a D90 ot D700…:-)
Ed
Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 10:22 pm