Just got back from a trip to Houston for work, and of course I found a way to sneak out to the zoo while I was there. I highlighted a story about their Jaguar over on the instagram, but this little cutie is the first story I wanted to share here.
You don’t see a lot of fences in my photos. Maybe the out of focus fences in the backgrounds of portraits, but not a proper fence. But here’s the thing: when an 18 month old Debrazza’s Monkey is interacting with you, watching you, and is so close that you couldn’t even try to blur out the fence, you take the photo anyway. Fence be damned, blown highlights be damned. Opal wanted to give me some attention, and I wanted to make the best of it.
One other thing of note is that I came really close to packing the 400/2.8 for this trip. The 400 is my telephoto of choice at the Denver Zoo; it just makes better images. It’s a major sacrifice of versatility though, and versatility is what I want when visiting a place I haven’t been before. I would have missed this photo with the 400. I’d have also missed the wider version that was posted on instagram. Bigger isn’t always better, and this 340mm f/6.3 shot is much better than the 400mm f/2.8 would have been.
The Zootographer 