Seneca Park Zoo

For this week's blog Amy and I decided to go to the Seneca Park Zoo.  We hadn't been for many years, in fact we think the last time we went was before Doug was born.  Given that the overwhelming majority of patrons had children between the ages of 1 and 5 in tow, our recollection is probably accurate.

The zoo is pretty small and is the perfect place for a young family to spend a beautiful sunny Saturday morning.  In our case it was a couple of middle aged folks seeking some photographic opportunities.

The zoo has 4 elephants, a polar bear (he was huge), white rhino, a tiger and two snow leopards to name a few of the many species we saw.  The tiger remained in the back of its relatively large cage and paced back and forth.  Its cage had a large amount of trees and shrubs and made getting a clean picture difficult.  The snow leopard exhibit was one of the last ones we visited and we arrived just as feeding time was beginning.  This caused the big cats to be much more active and gave me an opportunity to take several decent pictures.

I narrowed my favorite down to two pictures of the snow leopard and chose the one that was less of a profile and featured the eyes more.  I have posted the other candidate for your comparison.

I had both my 24-70 and 70-200 zoom lenses with me but kept the longer lens on the camera for the entire visit.  I wanted to get as close to the animals as I could with the available zoom and most of the pictures were taken at the maximum 200 mm focal length.  

I also wanted to make sure that motion blur wouldn't be a problem so I set the camera in aperture priority at 1/400 of a second and set the ISO to auto to make sure I got good exposures.  The D750 does an excellent job at exposure calculation and most of the shots were well exposed.

The ISO stayed at 100 for most of the shots as it was a bright sunny morning.  The two snow leopard pictures did require an ISO of 1600 due to their habitat being in deep shade.  The Nikon D750 handles ISO settings in this range with ease and the noise profile of these pictures at what used to be considered a very high ISO is almost undetectable.

This week's posting is the 52nd and final posting.  Next Saturday is my 53rd birthday and my 52nd year will be over.  I do plan to post one final summary blog next week and include a few bonus pictures that I took over the past 12 months that, for one reason or another, did not get posted.  I will have all the statistics on which posting had the most views and other fun facts.  Thanks for reading and looking at my pictures.