I hope everyone has a great year in 2008.

We went out to the zoo yesterday afternoon to stretch our legs and try out my new camera. The weather was a bit cool, but not too bad. We found when we got there that the carpark was closed and you can take your car in for free between November and February, so we were able to make our way around the zoo including the ‘Passage through Asia’ which is for cars only. It was so quiet in there that we were able to stop and take lots of photos. I have put the best of my photos up in a Zoo_31_December_2007 gallery on my picture gallery.

Some of the pictures I was quite happy with and some of them, I need to understand the impact of the settings and specifically how to adjust the autofocus area mode. The default is for still images and so I missed out on shots where I was following movement, like when one of the lions decided to stalk and pounce on the others.

It could be the lighting or the settings, but the images look a bit soft to me, I’ll have to play some more.

One thing I did miss was the longer focal length. A lot of the photos I have taken over the last couple of years have been at the longer end of my 60-300 Tamron lens with a doubler on. It seemed very strange to only have a 70mm (105mm equiv) instead of 600mm, but I’ll get used to it or get an Tamron Adaptall Nikon mount and use the 60-300 manually.