Just Jacque

I wanted to come up with a really funny title for this post, but clearly that’s not happening. I have a bit of an obsession with flamingos. I don’t know if it’s their beautiful pink coloring or the impossible curve of their necks or their ridiculous long, knobby legs. I just love them. Mostly I love big groupings of them where I can get lots of repeating lines or being able to zoom in really close on the details of an individual bird.

The Phoenix Zoo used to have a large flamingo enclosure with tons of birds. You could get close enough to take some really nice photos. The one they have now seems pretty small by comparison and there aren’t that many birds. Plus the bamboo fence surrounding it looks cheap and flimsy. I haven’t been able to get a really great flamingo photo for quite a while. Not that consistent failure would ever stop me from trying.

 

The water definitely made for a nicer background than dead grass and the cheesy bamboo fence. But the flamingo isn’t in a great pose or doing anything interesting. So it’s just a nice photo of a flamingo. Boooriiing.

 

 

At least this flamingo has his neck in an interesting position. There is a little blur in the black area of the beak because the bird was splashing the water when the photo was taken. Technically a competent photo, but again, nothing really special.

 

 

 

Here I got a little bit of the overlapping bird effect I wanted, but it still falls far short of what I’m trying to achieve. You can also see the ugly grass and fence in full effect here. Plus, the birds all have these big ID tags on their legs. Not something I want to feature in a photo. This just doesn’t work for me.

 

This is definitely a more experimental shot. I like the composition, even though you can’t see the head of the bird in the foreground. The foreground bird is spot on sharp and the background bird is slightly out of focus. I can’t say this was deliberate, it seems more obvious to have the focus reversed. But somehow I still like it. Not a great photo, but better than the previous three. So there you have it – a little peek behind the curtain. Usually I only feature my best shots, but sometimes it’s interesting to see the ones that don’t quite work.

One of the most prized animals in the Phoenix zoo is the Andean bear. Actually, they have two – one is a cub born just over a year ago. Their enclosure can be viewed from almost every side, so we kept circling it to get a better view of the mom and baby. They are really beautiful animals.

This is the mom. The low sun made the edges of her fur just glow. For some reason she seemed to have a sad expression on her face. I’m sure I’m just anthropomorphizing that. Humans are always trying to ascribe emotions to animals. She was probably just tired or bored. Wait, is that considered an emotion? This photo is a classic example of manipulating depth of field to make cages disappear. There was a large fence right in front of me but you can’t see it because it’s too close to the camera and therefore out of focus.

 

The bear cub proved to be a trickier subject. He was sitting in a spot where there were a lot of branches blocking him. This is the best shot I could get before he jumped out of the tree and moved away from my view. The crossed branches in front of him are a distraction, of course, but at least they aren’t blocking anything critical. He seems to have a pensive expression. There’s me with the anthropomorphizing again.

 

Actually, we just re-upped our existing zoo membership for the third year, but since we watched the movie over the weekend, I couldn’t resist. We had a free weekend of premium channels and We Bought a Zoo was one of the movies featured. Usually when we get one of these free trials it seems like all the movies are either ones we’ve already seen, ones we’ve bought on Blu-ray but haven’t gotten around to watching or ones you couldn’t pay me to watch. So, ironically, the free trial convinces me it’s not worth paying for premium channels.

But, as usual, I digress. We did actually go to the zoo today. We didn’t get there until 3:30, so we only had about 90 minutes to walk around. On the plus side, the crowds had really thinned out. On the minus side, the sun was really low and a lot of the exhibits were in shade, which made photography a little challenging. But with challenges there are always opportunities.

Some of the exhibits were just too dark for good photos, of course. Others had even shade with decent ambient light and others had really interesting side lighting. A lot of photos turned out blurry but there were enough keepers that it didn’t feel like a wasted trip.

I took quite a few photos of these baboons grooming. Most of them are blurry. This was a lucky shot. I love the expression on the left hand one’s face. “Hey, what are you looking at?”

I’ve photographed the Scarlet Macaws a number of times. Normally the sun is shining right on them and blowing out the white area around their eyes. Another win for the shade. This isn’t an amazing shot but the focus is perfect and you can see all of the incredible detail in the feathers. There is usually a pair in the exhibit but I only saw one today. I hope his friend is okay. These birds often seem stressed out to me. This one had a rough, picked patch in his feathers that’s not visible in the photo. Maybe that’s just normal behavior, but it worries me a little. Like most people, I’m a little ambivalent about the whole concept of zoos. They serve a purpose, but in an ideal world I’d rather all animals could live safely in the wild. Too bad the whole world isn’t like the Galapagos.

I’m going to break my string of posts featuring random photos. Did you notice I had a small trend going there? Unlike two years ago, when I just pledged to post at least one photo per day in January and usually ended up writing something about the photo. This year I thought I’d try writing about something every day and including a (usually) unrelated photo.

Does that make any sense? No? Good. We aim to confuse. My last personal photo outing of 2013 was to photograph the Fiesta Bowl Parade. This is our third year doing that. The weather was perfect – not too hot and not too cool and there was a bit of cloud cover to soften the normally intense Arizona sun. I wanted to try out a new lens that I’m thinking about taking to Australia/New Zealand, a Canon 70-300mm. It’s quite a bit heavier than my 70-200mm, so I brought a monopod to the parade.

I was psyched because I really felt like I had figured out how to get the best images from the parade based on my results last year. I actually processed and posted 101 photos to my online album, which is a huge amount for a two hour event. I was sure this year would be even better.

Or not. I don’t know if it was the lens, my use of the monopod or where we were standing, but I ended up with a bunch of crappy, blurry images. I think I processed 10 in total. Major disappointment. Maybe I’m just getting burned out on the parade thing.

We actually stand about a block before the official start of the parade. So for the first 15 minutes we had one group in front of us – a dance club of little girls. My husband refrained from photographing them, it just seemed a little creepy to him. It seemed a little creepy to me too, but of course that didn’t stop me. My favorite images didn’t include their overly made-up faces.

While I was trying to keep from freezing to death in Minnesota last month, I exchanged a number of emails with the MIM catalog editor. I was also supposed to call in to a meeting, but there was a bit of a snafu with the conference call so I got to listen to 40 minutes of dead air instead. Which made it slightly more productive than your average meeting.

A few additional photography requests came out of the dead air, of course. Most of them were pretty easy and required no assistance, but there were a couple of potential cover shots that called for my entourage. Oh, did I mention that my dad didn’t like any of the three potential cover photos I did before leaving Phoenix? The new direction is to have two horizontal photos – one of the building and one of either the Kenya exhibit or the Orientation Gallery.

I knocked out the easy shots a few days after we came back to Phoenix. A bunch of donor plaques, a new video image for the Rock exhibit, a close-up of some figures in a mechanical instrument and Alice Cooper’s head – nothing too unusual. Then I scheduled a date for the cover shots. I make that sound easy, but I think it involved close to a dozen emails.

I was specifically asked to include at least one child in the Orientation Gallery photo, to provide scale. I exercised my photographer’s discretion and shot the gallery empty, from several different perspectives. Kenya was a bust. I photographed it, but it just isn’t cover material. After looking at some quick mock-ups, I’m feeling pretty strongly that putting two photos on the cover is a bad idea. It looks like an advertising brochure, which is the same concern I had about including people. So we had the design company put together a couple of different options, some with single photos and some with multiple photos, which were reviewed in a meeting yesterday.

As usual, it was good news, bad news. The good news was we reached the consensus that a single image made for a much stronger cover. The bad news was it’s not one of my photos. It’s one of the old photos of the building’s front entrance taken by the architectural photographer several years ago. I’m actually really okay with it. I had an issue with using another photographer’s image on the first book and ended up replicating an existing shot. It bothered me and I certainly don’t want to do that again. I spent a lot more time and energy on that project and it was important to me to have my work on the cover.

This book feels like a rescue job. I started out having no involvement, then limited involvement, then no involvement again and finally, needing to provide the majority of the images in a very compressed time frame. It was exhausting but didn’t really lead to the emotional attachment I developed for the first book, which is a true art piece. This book is a gloried advertising brochure. A classy one, to be sure, but not in the same league.

So I am really okay with not being on the cover. Honestly, the thought of trying to take another shot at a “cover-worthy” image, just to feed my ego, is a little exhausting. I’d like to get out and do a little personal photography this month, as a warm-up for our big trip in March.

The random photo of the day is from our trip to Seattle in July. I love lily ponds.