The Great Experiment

Now, the question: What do I do today? Where do I go? Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a tiger --

Well, I suppose it's only fitting. One point off for my car's otherwise flawless navigation system, however, which REALLY REALLY wanted me to take a shortcut down a side alley marked 'Authorized Vehicles Only.'

The Tree of Life

Godzilla vs. Kid With Squirt Bottle

There's not really all that much interesting in Animal Kingdom yet, but I figured I might as well try it out. At the very least, pictures of cute animals might draw more people to look at my web pages.

When I got out of my car there, I realized it was HOT. And sunny, and humid. But the hot and the sunny went away before too long, and I found it wasn't too hard to fend off the humidity and keep myself cool with my squirt bottle. Besides, the park wasn't really full at all; I hardly had to wait in line for anything, and there were plenty of interesting things around to photograph.

Ooh, now you've made me blush

Tree of Life + defoliant

The never-before photographed pipsquack bird decides it likes having its picture taken

Chasing Peter Cottontail (at left) away from the food dish

But the rabbit gets away on his magic tricycle

My first stop here was to take a Kilimanjaro Safari. And I was lucky, as plenty of animals were out:

Twiga

Deer

Elephants (the one in the third photo wants to be a lumberjack)

Bears

The plural of rhinoceros

Tigers

A fractal tree in the wild

This ostrich hasn't gotten the hang of the whole nesting business yet

Hey, what's this?

Munch munch munch

Ooh, some more figs over there

I learned three valuable lessons about my digital camera on that safari trip.

First, it does not provide a lot of detail at medium to long ranges. A lot of "distant animal" photos I took turned out as "distant smudge," and so I didn't post them here.

Second, it needs a moment to focus before it can take a photo. For a still shot, this is no problem... I just push halfway down on the button, and it beeps after about a second to let me know it's focused, and then pressing the button all the way down fires off a shot instantly. But on a bouncing, turning safari truck, I wasn't accounting for that moment of focus before I jammed the button down... and it took the moment it needed anyway, so therefore the photo actually was snapped a second or two after I thought it was being snapped, resulting in some unintentional closeups of bushes or the backs of peoples' heads.

Third, I can't fire off a bunch of shots in rapid succession. My camera can only hold about three photos in immediate memory before it has to stop and compress them to its flash card, which can take fifteen or twenty seconds. So there were several times when a subject was coming closer, and I took too many shots too soon, and the camera refused to take any more pictures while the subject was passing right close by me.

Live and learn. :-)

[ Index | Day 4, part 3 ]