‘T was a good day with some sun and the occasional cloud so we decided to go and use our Whipsnade Zoo season tickets and see if the animals would cooperate for the new camera. Whipsnade also has a brand new cheetah enclosure which we were keen to see.
Muggins forgot to take his reading glasses (signs of age – both forgetting and needing them) so couldn’t review very well the shots as they were being taken but basic picture taking isn’t so very different from the film variety. I set the camera to record large JPEGs which gives a 450 shot capacity (that should suffice even if I keep the button pressed). Carol is currently using RAW format but she knows her camera and the associated Canon software better than I. Maybe I’ll try it later. The trouble is, my Adobe Photoshop Elements is too old (version 2) to display the Canon CR2 RAW format; it’s also too old for the plugin to that displays it to be applied. Drat! IrfanView is an excellent piece of freeware that does understand CR2, though. Phew! I recommend it. It also has some very good batch reformat/renaming facilities that get over the digital camera habit of naming all shots “IMG_####”.
Since the sun was out, so were the ring-tailed lemurs. These guys (and they are all guys – it’s a bachelor group) are far from camera shy and can be very good value given the right conditions. We spent some time with them until a group of school children turned up. There were several school trips though they were (mostly) under control. It’s usually very quiet during the week; sometimes a little too quiet.
Something new of interest often happens at Whipsnade, beyond the normal lemur suspects, that is. Though the majority of inmates frequently refuse to cooperate and feign camera-shyness, with a little patience and luck someone plays along eventually. This time, the penguins were being particularly active in their newly rejuvenated pools.
I was also very pleased with the results from the ostrich enclosure where Whipsnade has a male together with three ladies. One of the ladies seemed to be particularly curious about the long object I was pointing at her. Well, it is breeding season, I suppose. 🙂
The colours from the JPEG setting appear to be fine and so does the detail. I’m wondering if it’ll be worth bothering with RAW.
Technorati Tags: photography,Whipsnade,lemur,penguin,ostrich
Did I actually hear you say that a less than optimal digital setting was good enough? Carol should get you to hospital as quickly as possible!