Zoo Days Are Great to Scratch the Photographer Itch When You're a Parent

Menagerie Days Are Great to Scratch the Photographer Itching When You'Ra a Parent

September 21, 2019

As a parent of two young children, there isn't as much time for photography as there used to be. I often die down weeks without devising an image that isn't one of the kids. But all that changed when I discovered the joys of a zoo membership.

If you have boylike kids of a certain age, they are probably fascinated with animals. If you're a photographer, chances are that you, too, accept a enchantment with animals, or at least feature a passing enchantment with photographing them.

I relish my clip at the zoo. IT's excellent fun for the kids, but it's also a put off that's basically tailor-made for good photography. Yes, the scenes may constitute the same ones everyone else is acquiring, merely the photos are as much about the moments captured as it is the backdrop. So many animals have such quality-like behaviors and expressions that you get something unique each time.

It's also an opportunity to dust off several of my geartrain that sits in between my wide-set up cameras I use for jobs and the cell phone I use to take photos of the kids every day. Here are some of the things I commonly persuade.

One-Inch Sensor Cameras

Spell I've never rolled heavy with a full-figure DSLR and 400mm telephoto lens with kids in tow (because those 400s never fit easily in a diaper bag), I have taken one-inch sensor cameras like the Canon PowerShot G3 X or the G9 X. The beauty of this size sensor is that it's importantly larger than a cell phone, which affords some image quality improvements and shallow depth-of-subject possibilities, but is still small enough to be portable while still achieving a peck of zoom with small-ish fixed lenses. The 600mm eq in the G3 X is a meaningful amount of soar up and while the G9 X isn't even nigh, not all years have you zooming crossways a field to find a giraffe.

Micro Four Thirds

More often, though, I'll bust out the Micro Quaternion Thirds bodies and lenses. While my Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-140mm lens is a nifty all-in-one electron lens that will hand over me a 280mm equivalent field of sight, I often cooccur with the Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 75mm f/1.8 lens system for the wakeful depth of field IT affords me. A lens like this is perfect for the zoo because it's small, light and sharp even wide open, something that's important when you only have a few chances for a photo before you realize the kids have wandered unsatisfactory and you didn't see to it where they went. It's the lens I used on an Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark 2 to take the photo of the Bronx Zoo baboon at the apical of this post.

While both of these types of cameras (1-column inch and Micro Cardinal Thirds) baby-sit below APS-C and full-skeletal system in size, both punch above their weight, especially in the Micro Four Thirds system when you use a good lens.

A zoo membership is one of the things that's helped Pine Tree State bring back some of the merriment in photography I used to have when I had more time to merely take fun with information technology. As a bonus, this particular membership leave undergo Maine into few other zoos and aquariums in the area, and so that way more photography — I mingy family — outings in the future.

Wasim Ahmad is an subordinate teaching professor teaching journalism at Quinnipiac University. He's worked at newspapers in Minnesota, Florida and upstate Fresh York, and has antecedently taught multimedia journalism at Rocky Brook University and Siracusa University. He's also worked as a technical specialist at Canon USA for Still/Cinema EOS cameras.