We can’t all make a trip to Africa but fortunately I live just 20 minutes from the world class Memphis Zoo. Zoos afford the average photographer the opportunity to create high impact images of beautiful and exotic animals. There is not the difficulty of capturing an image in the wild, but you do have the challenge of minimizing the unnatural aspects of captive animals. I think of my Zoo photography as animal portraiture trying to capture the essence of the animal, and hopefully eliciting a response in the viewer to care about and conserve the natural world.
This is a photograph of an African Pygmy Falcon which only stands 12 inches tall, however it still has the intensity of any bird of prey. The photograph was taken at the Memphis Zoo aviary with a Canon 5d MkIII and a Canon 100 – 400mm zoom attached to a Canon 1.4 teleconverter. It was handheld at 1/60, f8.0, at ISO 2000. The RAW file was processed using the Nik Viveza and Silver Efex Pro plugins for Photoshop.
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