The Denver Zoo has two places that you really want to go when it’s very cold or very hot out: Bird World and Tropical Discovery. This day was very cold, so I was hanging out in the former.
The third large room of Bird World is home to their sloths, which makes it quite a big draw. And as much as I love a good sloth, I can’t get enough of the Inca Terns that share the same area.
Being a cold day, the zoo was pretty empty and these guys were acting a little more curious about any human who cared enough to visit. Well, not so much these guys as this one guy. I was trying to make a good portrait from the whistling ducks when this fellow landed about a foot away and just gave me that “look at me! look at me! I’m here too!” kind of face.
Turning the camera to him, he was far too low to the ground to make use of the viewfinder if I wanted any angle other than looking down at him. And the Pentax K-50 lacks one of those newfangled rotating screens you can use to use live view in weird positions. So I set my exposure (stopping down to f/2 to get a wee bit more depth of field since I wasn’t going to have the control I wanted), lowered the camera, and put my trust in my years of camera-aiming instinct and the camera’s autofocus.
Clearly, it worked. This little guy got the attention he wanted, and I got a killer portrait out of it.
The Zootographer 