Photographing At the Zoo

Copyright © 2007 Chris Bensen. All rights reserved.

Last week I took the family to the zoo. Our daughter loves animals and we figured she should see the monkeys in real life and not just stuffed animals and pictures in her books. I figured I'd bring my camera along. I don't typically photograph animals in captivity (it was a hard decision because I don't like seeing the animals in zoos, they don't look very happy and I'd prefer to see them in the wild), but it turns out you can do some pretty good photography at the zoo if you are careful and patient. The one problem is all the man made things like rocks and fences can really get in the way. In the photograph above you can see the fence behind the giraf and the man made rock that the meerkat is standing on below.


Copyright © 2007 Chris Bensen. All rights reserved.

At any rate my wife is a Science Illustrator and she can always use examples of animals to draw so I tried to capture the animals in good poses and ignore the man-mande contraptions. But the important thing is our daughter had a blast!