Archive for March, 2006
Zoo
I went to the zoo today. Perfect weather – sunshine and a little bit of snowfall. At the same time. A few years ago I visited the zoo almost every other week, but after I started shooting film I gave up on that and then I moved to Los which added 50km between me and Järvzoo. So it was interesting to see what has changed in the zoo since my last visit. The biggest thing is that they have finished the 5 Stora (Big 5) exhibition, which turned out to be quite of an information package that I didn’t have the energy to go through in detail after 3 hours of walking back and forth in the park. The rest of the park was the same as before, other than the new wolf enclosure in conjunction with the 5 Stora exhibit. I saw three wolves sleeping when I got in to the park, and the same three wolves sleeping in the same place on my out of the park… I guess they forgot the “out of order” sign (you’ll have to have seen “Fierce Creatures” to get the joke!). There were two other wolves in the old wolf enclosure and at feeding time, the keeper told me that they currently don’t have any female wolves but are expecting to get one soon from another zoo. Speaking of the feeding, the keeper went in the enclosure to throw in the meat. Lucky bastard.
Back when I visited Järvzoo frequently, I used to think that if I got a good image of any of the animals, the visit was successful (my standard for “good” was a bit lower than it is today). Some of the species are more difficult to shoot than others – say for example, the dark animals like musk ox and wolverine are impossible unless it’s bright and sunny. Otherwise the contrast between the subject and snow is too big. The lynx are also tricky – the enclosure is more like a pit where you look straight down on the animals. This is a big no-no for photography… can’t shoot them from above! There are only a few spots in the enclosure where you are at eye level with the lynx so good luck with that. Not to mention that the enclosure is very dark as it’s almost always in the shade. The little sunlight that gets in is patchy as it’s filtered through a pine forest.
What might come as a surprise is that you need a long lens even in a zoo. The musk ox image is taken with 300mm plus 1.4 converter (that’s effective 672mm) and still the animal doesn’t fill up the frame. Today in the zoo there happened to be a lot of other photographers as well, and one of them was carrying a 500mm lens. I didn’t see him use it though… mostly he was shooting with his film camera (he had film & digital bodies) and 100-400mm lens, which means that he didn’t have the same reach I had. I wonder how his images turned out… I’m not saying that bigger is better at all, but I’m always curious to see how other people portray the same subject.
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I’ve often wondered if I should learn more languages. I met a couple of photographers today who spoke French and German (and no English) but it didn’t help them so I guess I shouldn’t bother!
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Just when I had given up on winter after one more warm spell, it came back with a vengeance. A couple of days of snowfall and cold weather, and we have a contender for the best weekend of the winter!To get things rolling, we had the annual snowmobile event in Los today and I wanted to try my hand at action photography. I tried it last year as well, but the results were not up to much. This time I located myself on top of the race course at Furuberget, which I figured would provide the best action (I had stayed halfway last year and it wasn’t so good).
I also got to ride on a snowmobile myself. I’m sure it didn’t go quite as fast as it normally goes, but I hung on to my dear life anyway. Then these guys come racing up the hill and exactly how they don’t get thrown off their rides is beyond me… respect!
Photographing the action was something of a challenge. Because the movement was almost directly towards me, focusing was difficult – the camera can’t keep up. So I used the pre-focusing method instead, hoping that the rig would emerge where I had focused and then it was just a matter of keeping the finger on the shutter. I was half expecting all of the pictures to be soft, but I got a surprising amount of keepers so I’m pleased! I would have wanted to keep shooting, but there were no racers left and my fingers and toes were deep frozen anyway.
After a hot cup of tea to warm me up, I was ready to go skiing. This was the first time in three weeks that I’ve come near the gear and after a few kilometres, I felt the pain in my heels again. I was wearing two pairs of socks, and the bloody boots still chafed! What is the matter with them?! Well, blisters aside, it was a nice skiing trip. Since it was late afternoon, the light started to fade a little bit, helped by the snowfall. Not many pictures, but thoroughly enjoyable.
And tomorrow, I’m finally off to the zoo. In an ideal world I would also go skiing, but in my chafing-boots-world I will skip that.
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