Digital Focus: Wildlife Photography at the Zoo

Take great animal shots without risking life, limb, or poison ivy.

Dave Johnson

Feature: Taking Great Digital Photos at the Zoo

It's almost summertime. The skies are clear, the air is warm, and the last place you want to be is locked up in the office. If you have photography in your blood, summer probably reminds you of the great outdoors. But let's face it: An African safari is probably not in the budget. That's okay, because a visit to the local zoo can be a suitable substitute for a wildlife expedition. Don't laugh! If you haven't been to the zoo in a while, you may be pleasantly surprised; many have dramatically updated their facilities. These days there are fewer cages and bars, and more natural-looking habitats with authentic, comfortable digs for the animals. I've got a few tips that will help you snag good pictures while you're at the zoo.

Timing Your Expedition

What's the best time of day to take pictures at the zoo? There are a few answers to that question.

Mornings and afternoons offer good lighting. The best times to get good exposures at the zoo are early or late in the day, when the sun is low on the horizon. You might want to get there in the morning, about 7 or 8 a.m. if possible, and take pictures until about 11 a.m., then put the camera away until late afternoon when the sun is low again. Shots with the sun directly overhead lead to harshly lit photos, and most animals tend to nap around noon anyway.

Animals are active at mealtimes. Then there's feeding time to consider: Animals are most interesting when they're eating or expecting food. You should try to arrive at the wolf den or lion area, for instance, about a half hour before those large, exciting predators feed. They'll be very active before mealtime, and that'll make for some great photos. How do you know when certain animals eat? Ask a zoo employee or docent about the feeding schedule.

Plan your visit to avoid crowds. Many animals are easily intimidated, so they are most animated when there are few people around. Kids tend to scare animals, for obvious reasons. It's a good idea to avoid popular zoo days like Saturdays and holidays; take your digital camera mid-week or on a Sunday morning. Early morning is often quieter than late afternoon, but your local zoo staff can advise you about their quietest hours.

Setting Your Camera

Ready to shoot? You'll want to adjust your camera for zoo conditions, which are not typical. Since you're generally shooting into wooded areas, into enclosures with large overhangs, or indoors, you'll have less light to work with than usual. You should increase the camera's ISO setting to make its sensor more sensitive to light. Set it as high as it will go, usually about 400 or so. That'll help a lot, especially since your flash will do you no good. In fact, you should turn the flash off entirely.

If you have a tripod, you might want to bring it to set the camera on. Leave the head fairly loose, so you can steady the camera in low light but still quickly swivel it to capture your fast-moving subjects.

Finally, pay attention to your background. It's easy to get lost in the moment of photographing an animal and forget about the rest of the picture. When you frame your subject, try to position yourself and take the picture so the background is as natural as possible. For example, stand so that a lion walks past you with trees in the background--not the door to the enclosure. Even though it will often be fairly out of focus, you'll get more authentic-looking shots with a natural background.

Eliminating Bars

Shooting through bars or glass? Sometimes it's unavoidable. You can minimize the effects of those barriers on your photos, though, by getting as close as possible to them when you take your pictures. If you get very close to the bars and focus on the animals, often the bars will be so blurry that they'll be essentially invisible.

Dave's Favorites: See Your House from Space With TerraFly

I'm a big fan of satellite photography, and I've been using Terraserver.com for years. I just found another great satellite imagery site, though, and it's well worth checking out.

TerraFly makes it easy to scope out your neighborhood, your old high school, or famous landmarks. Just enter the address or zip code you want to visit, and the site displays it in a window, complete with navigation and zoom controls. What I really like about TerraFly is the way it automatically labels streets, making it easy to get your bearings when looking down on a city from space.

TerraFly sells its maps online--but browsing is free, and it's a blast.

Q&A: Is SmartMedia Going Away?

I have heard that SmartMedia is about to be discontinued. Is that true? Why?

--Ellen Eppel, Crookston, Minnesota

SmartMedia was one of the earliest flash memory card formats to arrive, just as portable devices like digital cameras started to appear on store shelves in the mid-1990s. The format has long been hobbled by a variety of technical limitations. Most importantly, SmartMedia cards have a fairly low maximum capacity of just 128MB, making them unsuitable for the latest generation of digital cameras and other gadgets that need lots of memory to perform well.

SmartMedia has managed to hang on in retail, but there's no doubt that it's getting harder and harder to find new digital cameras with SmartMedia slots. Olympus--the company that supported SmartMedia more vigorously than any other--has now thrown its weight behind XD-Picture Cards, which are kind of like a 21st-century version of SmartMedia.

Mike Wong, a spokesperson for SanDisk, agrees. "Every cubic millimeter counts," he says, "and manufacturers are moving to Secure Digital and XD to make their devices as small as possible. You just can't find SmartMedia devices out there anymore. That's because, for a lot of applications, SmartMedia is just too large. Who would have ever thought SmartMedia would be too big?"

He adds that the SmartMedia format is hobbled by some key design limitations, including its incompatiblity with I/O gadgets like Wi-Fi (802.11b) or Bluetooth cards--something that is not a problem with CompactFlash and XD. His bottom line: "We will continue to sell that card as long as there are people who want to buy it. That said, we have seen SmartMedia peak and sales are now declining. But it'll be around for a while longer."

While it's going to get harder and harder to find SmartMedia-compatible devices and SmartMedia cards on store shelves, this format has been around for almost ten years and isn't going to disappear overnight. As the sun sets on SmartMedia, though, expect to see companies like Olympus try to sell you the new XD-Picture Card instead. Personally, I have no interest in encouraging companies to roll out new memory card formats every few weeks, so I'm sticking with CompactFlash and Secure Digital card devices.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This week's Hot Pic: "American Icestorm," by Dan Brandenburg, Lexington, Kentucky

About this week's winner, Dan says: "During a recent ice storm that knocked out electricity for tens of thousands of people in my city, I had the good fortune of taking my Sony F717 around town to digitize some of the natural ice sculptures. The city, blanketed with several inches of ice, was incredibly beautiful. Trees looked as if they were wrapped in crystals; cars had inch-thick crystal shells. I eventually came across an American flag crystallized for posterity."

We want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com.

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