I wouldn’t normally rate zoos as a great source of photographs, many of the animals are behind fences, there are standoff barriers keeping you back and you’re often only spending a little amount of time with each animal. I’m lucky in so far as my step father is curator of a new zoo in Cromer meaning I get unprecedented access to the animals, early access to the zoo (so very few people around) and the house is in the zoo grounds allowing me spend as much time as I like with each animal and photograph them at the best times of day.

My primary focus was the two pumas that had just arrived. Called pinky and blacky (so called because of the colour of their noses) I spent many hours rattling off shots of these two. Pinky seemed to have settled in very well and spent most of the time on top of one of the large trees that had been put in the enclosure simply watching the world go by. Blacky, on the other hand, had not settled at all.

Despite not being able to go into the enclosure with the cats (they’re far too dangerous) I was able to get up close to the enclosure fence and get some pretty good shots. Even with a nice wide aperture blurring the fence out actually getting decent shots was hard so being able to spend the time with them to get the best poses was a godsend.

Even getting into the enclosures didn’t always help with getting rid of the fences. I spent over 3 hours lying in the aguti enclosure waiting for the perfect shot. Only one of them would come out while I was in there and even then he kept to the edges of the enclosure. By picking some creative angles I was able to get a few shots where it wasn’t apparent that the animal was captive

Despite going for the pumas I actually spent the most time with the marmosets. My usual cry when doing wildlife photography is ‘bigger lens’ and I do most of it with my 70-200, often with a 2x teleconverter. The marmosets, on the other hand, were so inquisitive that I ended up using my 24-70 lens and even my 100mm macro since it’s the only thing that would focus at the kind of distances I was having to deal with. The biggest problem I had was framing the shots before the darted off to another branch as they move incredibly fast. Eventually the monkeys got so comfortable with me around that they were trying to grab the camera and were putting their heads right into the lens hood to check out their reflections.

Unfortunately I lost a day and a half’s shooting as my camera decided to break down mid way through my holiday and I hadn’t brought my spare body. I did manage to get a couple of shots of some of the other animals but I’ll have to go up another time when my camera has been repaired. Hopefully then the rest of the animals will have arrived.

All images in this post can be found at images from… under the pumas, marmosets, aguti and random animals galleries in the cromer zoo section.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 2:18 pm and is filed under cromer zoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.