City Zoo, Internet Jungle

If you, like me, are a fan of the Indianapolis Zoo, you might want to be aware of a social media scam that's circulating.

The Indianapolis Zoo is warning guests of a scam that is making the rounds on social media offering a ticket giveaway.

The zoo posted the alert Monday evening showing a Facebook post that claims to be offering 200 people a chance to buy four tickets to the zoo for $6.95. The post includes a photo that features the Indianapolis Zoo's Facebook profile photo and the claim that the zoo is turning 80 years old.

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King of the Beasts

Olympus E-600 & the magical Zuiko 150mm f/2

This is Enzi, the seven year old 450-lb male lion at the Indianapolis zoo. His brother, Mashaka, went to Santa Barbara's zoo.

There was a bit of drama in the lion enclosure at the Indianapolis Zoo one morning a few years back when Enzi's mom, Zuri, straight-up murdered Nyack, her mate and the father of her three cubs.

I needed that...

I hadn't been to the zoo in too long. This morning featured a much-needed mental health break.

Olympus E-3 & Zuiko 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5

Giraffles!

An ugly bird.

The marabou stork is not the most fetching of avians.

"I heard that!"

As with most birds with largely featherless noggins, it's adapted for a lifestyle that involves a lot of time spent with its head stuck inside of corpses. Can't get your feathers all covered in clotted nastiness if you don't have any.

Most storks eat fish and frogs and the like and are far more attractive animals. Another thing I'm reminded every time I see them is how enormous marabous are. Wingspans in the 7-9 foot range are apparently the norm.

"Are you still talking about me?"

Apparently they've become common dump pests in sub-Saharan Africa:

"Increasingly, marabous have become dependent on human garbage and hundreds of the huge birds can be found around African dumps or waiting for a hand out in urban areas. Marabous eating human garbage have been seen to devour virtually anything that they can swallow, including shoes and pieces of metal. Marabous conditioned to eating from human sources have been known to lash out when refused food."

That sounds positively unnerving, because these are some big-ass birds.

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Turbo Kitties!

A good camera and lens really makes a huge difference at the zoo. Even the "2x zoom" on most cell cameras is only about the equivalent of a 50mm lens on a full frame camera.

The old style 80-400mm Nikon zoom I was using is available on the used market pretty cheaply for what it is, because it won't autofocus on D3xxx or D5xxx cameras that don't have internal focus motors. But that 400mm focal length will get you right in there with the critters.

I thought about using a crop sensor body, since the narrower field of view would give an effective 1.5x focal length boost. Maybe next time. These were all shot with the D3.

Man, a bad day taking pictures at the zoo is still a pretty good day. I really should spring for a membership.

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Just Zoo It

You know what I haven't done in a while? Go to the zoo.

I've got an 80-400mm lens that's just itching for a look at a tiger.

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Yesterday (well, day before yesterday), Part Three

I had a pair of full-frame bodies with me at the zoo: A Nikon D700 and a Canon 5D Mark II. It wasn't really a comparison, because they were wearing very different sorts of lenses. The Nikon had a 24-120mm "travel zoom" lens, a focal length range good for a wide variety of shooting.

The Canon, on the other hand, was fitted with the 70-200mm f/2.8L zoom, a lens I'd been itching to play with at the zoo since the day I got it...

For a pair of cameras that haven't been cutting edge for a decade, they both did pretty well, I think.

All my zoo photography thus far has been with APS-C or smaller sensors, so as it turned out, I often found myself wanting more reach from the 70-200. It was so bright outside that even capturing flying water droplets from the grizzly was doable without having to resort to wide apertures, and I only made use of the full f/2.8 in the desert biome and snake exhibit. In retrospect, I should have brought along my 2X Extender, because the 140-400mm focal length would have perfectly complemented the other camera and having the maximum aperture reduced to f/5.6 would have been no handicap.
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Yesterday, Part Two

The hike to the zoo wasn't terribly far. It's probably somewhere between half and three quarters of a mile between the corner of Washington & Capitol and the zoo gates. Complicating factors were that it was, as mentioned, hot as Hades on Wednesday, and I was also carrying ten pounds of camera gear.

The ten pounds of camera gear, however, were kinda the whole point of the trip...

At one fell swoop...

I'd never used IndyGo, our city's mass transit system, in the ten years I've lived here. I hate memorizing bus schedules and transfers and stuff like that, and so just never bothered.

The Monon Trail? I use that all the time; it's a convenient bicycle highway from home to Broad Ripple Village proper, and you only have to worry about one grade crossing between here and there, since there's a bridge over busy Kessler Avenue. But buses? Just never really bothered.

But then they put in the Red Line, a simulated streetcar service using articulated buses instead of trolley cars, right down the middle of College Avenue near the house.

People griped that they were "taking away" a lane of traffic on College, but really they were just taking it back, what with College being three lanes wide since the streetcars used to run up the center lane. You could even see the old railroad ties where they tore up the road to install the Red Line stations, since they'd just paved over the old tracks.

Anyhow, now a bus whizzes past the station at 54th and College every ten-ish minutes in either direction. In a sort of "The first hit's free, kid!" fashion, the Red Line is free to ride for the month of September, and I made use of that fact to go and do a couple downtown errands without having to worry about parking or the like.

The downtown Roberts Camera store is an easy ten minute walk from the Red Line station at Capitol Avenue & 9th Street, so I dropped off a roll of Ilford XP2* on Thursday and then strolled over to The Eagle on Mass Ave for lunch, then walked the few blocks south down Delaware to the central bus station and caught the northbound Red Line for home.

That was handy, and with none of the annoyances of driving downtown or trying to find parking. (Last time I tried to eat lunch at The Eagle, I circled the block twice until I got a parking space that was reasonably close.)

I repeated the performance on Friday, albeit grabbing lunch at The Tap instead of The Eagle, and it went just as smoothly.

I'm a big Red Line fan now.

Noodling around in Google Maps this morning, I realized that the Red Line station at Capitol Avenue and Washington Street is, like, a ten minute walk from the front door of the State Museum and it's not much further to the gates of the zoo.

Thanks to the Red Line, it is now about a one mile walk from my house to the zoo, with a thirty minute bus ride sammiched in the middle of it.

Guess where I'm going at some point this week?

*Ilford XP2 is a C41 process black & white film that can be processed by any place that processes color film. Actual B&W processing is a lot harder to come by these days if you don't do it at home.
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I did not know that...

Apparently Evansville, Indiana has a pretty nice little zoo. It's about ten acres smaller than Indianapolis's own (relatively modest) zoo, and houses 200 species to Indy's 320, but it's actually older, having been founded in 1928, well before Indianapolis's post-WWII zoo.

The only downside to visiting is that I'd probably want to overnight there. Evansville is the state's third most populous city, located down in the toe of the state. (The "toe" being in the southwest corner near the confluence of the Wabash and Ohio rivers.) Until I-69 gets completed, it's sort of in "you can't get there from here" territory for day trips from Indianapolis.
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Busy with other stuff this morning, so have some cat pictures.

The zoo's my blues muse.

So, the first time I went to the Indianapolis zoo, we were there for a company picnic with Bobbi's employer. It was late summer of 2011, and I had the Kodak EasyShare V1073 that I'd bought to photograph the LuckyGunner blogger shoot along with me. I had a lot of fun shooting pictures at the zoo.

The next time I was there was again with Bobbi, on a lark on one of her vacation days in 2013. Two years later, I had a more formidable camera. The Canon PowerShot SX500IS was all ate up with megapixels (16!) and zoom-X's (30!) relative to the Kodak, and I did indeed manage to get some better pictures with it.

In the summer of 2014, Kirk and I bicycled down to the zoo, and I schlepped along my then-current camera, a Canon 20D with an 18-135mm travel zoom lens fitted. I was super happy with a few of my shots. I was more patient on the shutter, and had at least some eye toward composition.

Fast forward to yesterday:

The Winter That Won't End has not been kind to my SADS. I've been struggling with enough give-a-damn to get out of the house on plenty of days, and have had too many that saw me stay in pyjamas, sitting at my keyboard until well in the afternoon before I could yank myself out of a mope long enough to run errands.

Tuesday's weather was forecast to be sunny by lunchtime, with a temp that might flirt with fifty degrees in the afternoon. "You know what?" I thought to myself on Monday afternoon, "I'll bet a trip to the zoo tomorrow, just by myself, with no schedule to worry about, would be just the thing to snap me out of my funk. I'll bring good cameras, and it will be awesome."

So I drove down and pulled into the zoo parking lot and the signs were good. I'd tried doing this last Friday only to abort at the last minute when I saw that the parking lot was jammed full and half of it was school buses. Tuesday at lunchtime, though, there were only a half dozen school buses and the parking lot was barely a quarter full.

The weather, though, had probably something to do with it. It was 34°F and gusting as I walked across the parking lot. There were more kids running around screaming than I thought there would be, and my hands were getting a little cold as I stood looking down into the walrus tank...

But, oh what I was seeing through the viewfinder! I had the full-frame Sony A7 with me, fitted with the 24-240mm zoom that my friends had pooled their dough and surprised me with. Oh, you could see the walruses' vibrissae glistening and the water droplets frozen in space as they surfaced and spun and dove... These pictures were going to be great!

After about ten minutes of shooting, I noticed the kids were thinning out, and I decided to duck into the desert biome to warm my hands while I shot pictures of lizards.

There in the indoor display, shooting from an awkward angle, I was composing the shot using the screen on the back of the camera instead of the viewfinder and... what were those orange letters blinking in the top right corner of the screen?

NO CARD

Oh. Fudge. Except, much like that more famous Hoosier, I didn't say "fudge".

I fumbled in the little pocket of the Event Messenger 100 intended to hold spare memory cards. There was no card in there, either.

Oh. Fudge.

Wait, the zoo gift shop! They used to sell film in those back in the day! Maybe they had some cheap SanDisk 8GB cards for three times what they were worth?

I half-ran across the zoo to the gift shop, but no dice. Oh, they had some emergency battery chargers for smart phones, which is how half everyone records images these days. If you were perverse enough to be schlepping actual camera gear around the zoo, you were obviously expected to be squared away enough to have remembered to check your cameras before you left the house.

Walking dejectedly from the gift shop, I took a few deep breaths and centered myself.

I'd learned one lesson from that long ago trip to Tennessee: Anyplace worth bringing one camera is worth bringing two. The camera bag over my shoulder is the one I take with me everywhere. It holds my iPad Mini and its type cover, an Olympus PEN E-P5, and three lenses, with the 14-150mm zoom mounted on the camera. It's a good little rig and the one I used to do almost all my picture-taking at Tac-Con.

Determined not to waste the trip, I decided to just walk it off and shoot the zoo with the PEN.

Meanwhile, the sun came out, the temp rose into the 40's, and along about one o'clock or so, the zoo largely emptied out. I was glad I stayed.

The Olympus did just fine, by the way, and I had a fantastic time.

You know, the zoo is only about a twenty minute drive from the house, and annual memberships aren't terribly expensive. This is some cheap therapy, when you think about it.
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Al Capone's vault...

So I went to clean out the car prior to sending it off to the auto day spa. I opened the door, briefly wondered if I was supposed to throw in a lit torch to see if there was enough oxygen in the sealed tomb, then began rummaging under the seats and stuff, just to make sure I hadn't inadvertently left any heaters in there or anything.

Things I found:

• My old Royal Robbins "shoot me" vest. I have no idea why it was in there.


• The Surefire Z2 I kept in the door pocket. Boy, how spoiled we've become in flashlights! I remember when this thing was eye-searing magic, but after using a P2ZX Fury, 62 incandescent lumens looks about half as bright as a dead firefly. 


• A rock from Blogorado a couple years back. I put it in with the Hoosier rocks in the herbaceous border with the fervent hope that it baffles the **** out of some future alien geologist who concocts a wacky theory to explain its presence.

Some monkey's uncle...

At first we didn't think we'd get a good look at the white-faced gibbons. You could barely make out a couple, 'way up top of a 'rock' in the corner of the cage, when suddenly the one who was practicing hairdressing noticed us...

"Girl! Just look at this hair! It is a mess!"

...and leaped into the abyss from its clifftop eyrie, brachiating through the limbs and ropes down to where we were in order to get a closer look. Indeed, we were rather thoroughly scrutinized...

When you stare long into a gibbon cage, the gibbon also stares into you.

After a few long, pensive moments (and a thorough tactile exploration of one of its nostrils) it headed back up the cliff and returned to its grooming chores.


Bonus! Overheard in the Office:

Me: "Did you happen to notice if that was a little fella gibbon or a little filly...?"

RX: "You know, I don't make a habit of..."

Me: "...Staring at the genital area of the monkey hanging on the cage in front of you?"

RX: "No. And people that do, need help."

Lettuce get ready to rumble!

Flying foxes preparing to squabble over lunch.

The brawls these things got into while hanging by their feet from the ceiling were epic. Bobbi described them as looking like "cats fighting with umbrellas."

Batophobes would not dig these flying foxes, what with their >3' wingspans. It's amazing that critters with bodies the size of small dogs and wings spreading half a fathom weigh only three pounds or less.

Don't tread on me.

Nose-to-nose with a fair-sized eastern diamondback rattler. Thankful for the glass.

Brown funk...

Indy's zoo has bears of the non-polar variety, too!

Zzzzz...

The brown bear: Ranking somewhere between zombies and home invaders in "What's the best gun for...?" threads on internet gun fora. This big fella has sold magnum revolvers like DiFi has sold AR-15s.

Bobbi has a metapicture of this picture here.

Chillin'.

He always looks pretty relaxed, actually...

While the temps in the low 60s may have been a bit balmy, the breeze and sprinkling rain probably felt good to this polar bear. (At least until a nearby crack of lightning startled him not long after this picture was snapped...)

'Splosions, gun ban treachery, too much MSG...

Sometimes you just have to say "Screw it" and go to the zoo. So we hied off to the Indianapolis Zoo.

Doin' the flamingo dance.

 It was something of a rushed visit; weather was closing in.

The gray sky in the background is what we call a "clue".

I really want a DSLR now. Too much fencing and glass can fool even the smartest autofocus the Canon ShowerPot can bring to bear.  Need a polarizing filter to cut down on reflections, too.

Still, that 30x optical zoom is capable of some pretty spiffy tricks for a point-'n'-shoot:

Sea lions don't actually roar...