Greetings from the road to Terre Haute. Linda and I are on our way back home from our trip to French Lick (chuckle) and thanks to being so far behind on posts this month I have resorted to using our travel time to pump a few blog posts out. Today we have a special treat and by that I mean a guest photographer. The first stop on our mini-vacation was to the Indianapolis Zoo. Linda and I loaded up all of our camera equipment and headed out for a day of mirror slapping. Later that night, Linda post processed some of her pictures for her peeps on Facebook (sigh). I must say, she produced some amazing shots and thought I would share them with you. Let’s start with the big cats.
That cat came out tack sharp with nice detail in the fur. The tiger also has a look of intent as it stares down a small child with a face painting of a deer… kidding, it was actually watching his mate (below) taking a morning swim. In truth, I would hate to be a deer that came face to face with that killing machine. The composition isn’t the only thing that impresses me about this particular shot. The fact that it even came out at all is a credit to Linda’s photographic abilities. The tiger was actually behind GLASS at high sun. One might be able to dismiss this as pure luck (hints of a certain sunflower picture), but then she pulled out this shot.
She also captured the tiger’s mate taking a swim in their pond. Again, tack sharp (check), captivating expression (check), difficult lighting (check) with the added composition element of reflection (score). All that is plenty enough but yes, it was taken through the very same glass protecting it from us. She actually manually focused these shots to compensate for the false glass readings. My only credit point is I taught her how to take pictures in full manual exposure mode which she is now downplaying as just a refresher from her 35mm Pentax days. This is probably a good time to point out that it was extremely hot the day we were there which is probably why a cat (notorious for not really liking water) decided to seek relief in the stream. “How hot was it?… it was so hot, even the cheetahs had their sneakers off and lounging in the weeds.”
Although not through glass, this big cat shot was nicely done as well. It was actually in mid sentence asking us if we’d be willing to get it a slurpy (antelope flavored) to help cool down. One of the features at the Indy zoo was to test your speed against a cheetah. I had heard the programmed announcer (Tony Stewart who helped fund this exhibit) initiating the races which were going off about 3 minutes apart. I was actually feeling sorry for the poor cheetah having to continually race in blistering heat until I came upon the race site. It was just an electronic simulation consisting of lights representing the cheetah’s speed above a single lane track for the human to run on. If those lights were accurate, that cat can move! The heat was getting to everyone that day and most of the animals were seeking any shelter they could find in their natural pens. The polar bear below was taking a snooze when we first arrived at the zoo around 9:15am.
Hit the jump to see a few more great pictures of wildlife at the Indy Zoo
