Although it’s an expensive afternoon out [£19 per person, including a small voluntary donation], we had a thoroughly enjoyable trip to the zoo on Saturday. I managed to expose 2 full 4 gig card’s worth of pictures over the course of about 2 1/2 hours, which is something of a record. That included about 350 shots in about 10 minutes. The highlight of the day for me was this shot:

1/800 sec at F5, ISO 200 at 250mm

Although it’s faster than it needed to be, I’m quite pleased with the grouping, and the eye contact with the main subject. Cracking off nearly 350 pictures of same subject matter at up to 6 frames a second does make for an editing / selection headache. It also, unavoidably, dilutes the quality-to-dross ratio: I have a series of 6 shots of an otter yawning which is kind of hard to get excited about, but I was conscious of having a very limited opportunity with some fantastic subject matter.

The high speed capability of the 40D – first time that I’ve really felt I needed it – really did come into its own.

1/400 sec at F5.5, ISO 100 at 400mm

[I might put a few more of these up at the weekend; struggling with some hardware problems that are eating my spare time.]