On Saturday, we took SteelyKid to the Bronx Zoo. It was kind of hot, and she got a little over-tired by the end, but it had a lot of amazingly cute moments, too. And, unlike Sunday's trip to the beach, I brought my camera and shot a couple hundred pictures of various things. Including this shot of SteelyKid on Grandpa's shoulders at the start of the day:
That's a keeper, all right. What was she looking at? Well, this happy couple:
Hello, large predatory cat.
And hello to you, too, Aslan.
(These could probably be improved further with some slightly more sophisticated image processing-- the sunny bits in the background lose a lot of detail when I bump the levels up enough to make the foreground objects look right. I have a big book on digital photo processing, now (a birthday gift), and these will give me some good material to work with as I figure that stuff out. In my copious free time.)
(Also, these were shot with the 55-250 mm zoom lens I bought last fall, which totally justified the expense on this one zoo visit. I got some really nice pictures that would've been completely impossible with the kit lens. It made shooting people a little awkward, but I still got some good SteelyKid shots, as well.)
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But did you see the cobra?
We did not see the cobra. When SteelyKid started to overheat, she didn't care for exhibits that were indoors and dark, so we opted to skip the Reptile House.
Kate suggested I should post something to Twitter, but I couldn't come up with anything under the pressure of being outside the home of the famous tweeting cobra, so I passed.
The most useful tool for dealing with those lighting problems is economically available in Photoshop Elements with the Shadows-Highlights option under Enhance Lighting. It defaults to something stupid that assumes tons of shadow, but something like 20% on highlights and just a touch (1 or 0) on shadows would make Aslan look great. It is much slicker than working with levels.
wut
does not compute