When you talk about the zoo back in KL, you think of the KFC ad where the children sing , “Let’s go to the zoo, there’s a lots of things to do” etc etc etc (circa late 80s?). Heh, it made the zoo sound like fun but sadly, there weren’t many animals to see and you could smell the animals from a mile away.

Went to the local zoo in Melbourne on Saturday. Heh, was all excited about the trip, not because I’ve never been there before (I went there 6 years ago), but because I could snap on my 28-200mm zoom lens on my D70 to go take pictures of animals. Heh, what I’d give to get one of the 80-200mm VR lenses (which incidentally, cost more than my D70 kit alone). It was a cloudy day, so light was always going to be inadequate. The plus side was that there would be no strong shadows lingering so I was happy to tweak up the ISO to get some good shots.

The zoo is like 10 min by car from the city area, so it’s quite accessible to most people. It’s quite an amazing zoo, with a wide variety of animals. There’s the usual Australian fauna, animals from Asia (tigers, leopards and all sorts of exotic cats) and Africa (lions, zebras, giraffes). There are also reptiles and an aviary where you get to see many colourful birds as well.

The zoo covers a rather large area and it would be a good idea to spend a day at least at the zoo. Bring along a picnic basket and you could have lunch on one of the lush, green lawns in the zoo. This is definitely a good place to have an outing, and also to bring along your camera and snap shots. So I spent about 2 1/2 hours at the zoo, and this was the first outing where I managed nearly 280 shots and took up most of my 1GB memory card. Digital is such a convenient format that you can just take pictures to your heart’s content (as long as you have the HD space to store it later). My only lament is that I take pictures for granted at times and don’t try to tweak the settings to get a very good shot. A lot of it is trial and error, but with animals, they shift positions very quickly and it’s best to just set a generic mode (Program mode for me) and take pics on the fly, only changing ISO depending on the lightness/darkness of the scene and the available light. Still don’t play very much with exposure settings and should take better note of shutter speed at high focal lengths.

Actually, it’s a wonder at times, that we can only see animals in captivity. While I don’t know how much the animals mind it, but humans wouldn’t be able to view them any other way. Zoo animals are semi tamed as in they only know the four walls that confine them and they understand that they are taken care by humans (or so I believe). We encroach on their territories so much, that in order to save them, we have to imprison them. Hmm, just wondering at times.

Will be posting zoo pictures over the next couple of days. Heh, it was a fun trip indeed.