Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Houston Zoo Again




Jerry Klumpp called yesterday and asked if I would like to join him at the Houston Zoo. Even through I had been there last week I wanted to go again because last week I was stuck with a single lens, the 105mm macro. Debbie and I had planned to go to the butterfly center and I wanted to lighten my load by only carrying one lens. For today I decided to take the 70-200mm and the 50. I also wanted to take the Lensbaby if I wanted to play.

Jerry and I met at a restaurant in the Montrose area for lunch. We wanted to go in the afternoon and stay until it closed at 6pm because we normally go in the morning. We thought it would be interesting to have different light. As we were leaving the restaurant I noticed that there was no camera bag in the car. I checked the trunk, still no bag. I had done one of two things. I had left it at home or I had left it in the car and failed to lock the doors. Fortunately, I had put my fiberbuilt case that contains all of my lenses in the trunk before I left the house, but I had no bag to carry a spare to I was back at the zoo with only one lens. This time it was the 300mm fixed focal length—pretty limiting but it was that or the 105mm again or a wider lens.

Because of the limitation, I didn’t shoot a lot of different animals but I did shoot a lot of photographs of the ones that I did shoot. Will be forever processing them, or I’ll just do the ones that I like best and forget the rest—good idea.

Had a great time. Got a few fairly good photographs and a lot of much needed exercise. At six when they ran us out Jerry didn’t want to get on the freeways at that time of the day so he wanted to go downtown to see what he could find. I would have loved to go along because I love shooting downtown, but after four hours of mostly walking this was one tired old man so I headed for home. Thought about stopping for dinner along the way but was even too tired to do that.


Now, I have go to get all of these processed before we head off to Washington on the Brazos next Saturday. BTW: The lost camera case was sitting on the chair beside the front door, which is what I suspected all the time--old people do that you know.













Someone had thrown a Styrofoam cup into the orangutan enclosure and he was dutifully eating it. It's bad enough to have to photograph an orangutan with obvious zoo equipment, but to include a Styrofoam cup was the pits. Fortunately toward the end of shooting most of it was gone but he still had pieces of Styrofoam stuck all over him.  Maybe they need to give IQ tests at the gate to see if you are smart enough to see the animals


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