The Greater Vancouver Zoo is located about 50 km east of Vancouver and took us about 45 minutes to drive there. While it was nice and sunny yesterday, it was a bit colder than usual (about 10 degrees C). This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as there was far fewer people at the zoo. I suspect that during the summer time, the place must be really packed. Since our last trip in Eastern Canada last September, I had not really done a huge amount of picture taking and I was quite anxious to try out me long range zoom lens that I had bought specifically for our upcoming Africa trip. In yesterday’s trip, there were a lot of opportunities to use the new lens at it’s maximum and I have to say that I’m really happy with it.

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For those of you who are interested in the technical details of the photography, here is some information for you. All of my pictures were taken with my Nikon D300 and a Nikkor 70-300 f4.5-5.6 VR lens. On my DX format digital camera this gives me about the 35mm equivalent of 105-450mm and most of the pictures were taken with the lens at the maximum 300mm. Shooting hand held with the lens at this focal length would have been nearly impossible were it not for the VR (vibration reduction) feature of this lens. Most of the shots were taken hand held without any tripod or support. About 25% were taken with the lens resting on the wire fence if the holes in the fence were large enough to allow this and I brought my small bean bag that I also used for a few shots. I was recording the images in raw (Nikon NEF) set to 12 bit and compressed. This was producing a 10MB file for every shot. My camera was set to Program automatic mode and manually set to 400 ISO. For some shots, I would manually override the Program mode.

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My pictures from our zoo trip can be seen here. Baden